finding identity through art

As I spent time over the past few months looking over the art and literature pieces that were submitted to bonfem, I got to thinking about identities. Each piece I read or observed had a distinct voice, and I felt I was able to meet hundreds of women without ever encountering them face-to-face. But these were only moments in time. Snapshots of who these women were at that exact point, confined within margins of a jpeg or a thousand words and under. 

My creativity has been my lifeline for as long as I can remember. If I wasn’t scribbling stories into my notebook I was in the dance studio trying to master a tour jete, or tickling the strings of my pink guitar, or on a stage somewhere losing myself in an imaginary role to an imaginary audience. But for as long as I flourished in my artistry, I also wrestled with my identity. Looking around me, everyone seemed to have their “thing”. A talent or passion that was distinctively theirs. Something that solidified their existence. I never felt I had that, and it became a burgeoning anxiety of mine. 

My art has presented itself in various forms throughout my life. I took years of ballet lessons, choir lessons, theater classes. I tackled visual art in every form, I taught myself the guitar, I made and decorated cakes, wrote songs and poems, made beats on an app on my tablet. I explored my self-expression through fashion and makeup, trying every style until I found what felt right. But after a while I began to grow restless. I wondered why I wasn’t like others; able to pick one outlet and stick to it, make it my identity. Each creative role that I took on felt true to me in that moment, and when the passion for that faded I would move on to the next as ardently as I had the last. But I was constantly plagued by the question of who I was. 

The summer after I graduated high school, I was determined to uncover my true creative self. I embarked on a journey of self-discovery called The Artist’s Way, a program based on a book by Julia Cameron. One of the main pillars of the program was that each week, the reader take  themselves on what was called an Artist Date. Essentially, once a week the reader takes themselves on a “date” where they engage in some sort of artistic activity, and in doing this and following the other guidelines in the book, they would find their true creative self. When I started the program, I expected that at the end of the twelve weeks I would have my clear answer as to who I was supposed to be. Like a self-test that would tell me what career I would succeed the best in, or a quiz that would tell me which 90s sitcom character I relate to the most. Something simple; You are a dancer. You are a writer. You are a singer. I could take my result and go on my merry way, finally tethered to an artistic identity, leaving me free to leave all my other brief passions in the past. But as the weeks progressed, I found myself even more adrift. I wasn’t getting any closer to pinpointing my talent, if anything I was discovering completely new artistic outlets that satisfied me, which made my search broader and more frustrating. 

And then one day, I found a notebook wedged in my bookshelf. It was old and dilapidated, and I hadn’t looked at it since I was probably eight or nine years old. In it, though, I’d written a fantastical retelling of my parents’ divorce through the magical lens of a fairy princess and her pirate lover, complete with a song and accompanying illustrations. Despite the simplistic themes and questionable syntax of the story, it helped me realize something. 

So I drew out another old book, this one a drawing journal I’d started when I was fourteen and just starting to discover my passion for activism. My drawings illustrated various injustices encountered by the different minority groups that I belonged to. As I was learning about and contextualizing my race, gender, class, and sexual identity, I expressed my frustrations through my drawings. 

I began to think about what I had previously referred to as my creative “phases”, and how they aligned with my circumstances. The endless hours I spent in the dance studio after my first heartbreak, or the love for songwriting that emerged during my first experiences with grief. The heart I poured into cake decorating while my dad recovered from a stroke, the polaroid pictures littering my walls that captured hundreds of moments from the happiest year of my life. I started to realize that these creative bursts weren’t just “phases”, they were my way of articulating the emotions that accompanied the calamities I endured throughout my life. There, in the pages of notebooks and the cries of songs and the strokes of paint brushes, lay my identity.  

I couldn’t find what I was looking for, not because I wasn’t looking in the right place, but because I was simply looking at it wrong. It was like looking at an optical illusion; I wasn’t exactly sure what I was supposed to be seeing but I knew I wasn’t seeing it. I was squinting my eyes and turning my head every which way, but the picture still looked the same. Only when I closed my eyes could I reopen them, and see it in a new light. I was trying to find who I was by attaching it to one activity, one talent, one thing I could call mine. But art is only a reflection of identity, not the axis of it. The multidimensional facets of my identity and the experiences that shaped it were evinced by the ever-changing nature of my art. 

My favorite thing about art is that it grows with you. Whether that looks like it did for me, taking on varying shapes, or one form you can nurture from your start to finish. As you grow, so does your art. It’s easy to cringe when I look back at the way I wrote months or years ago, but I am grateful for that dissonant feeling; it means I’m growing. 

Making art is measuring your height on the kitchen wall as you grow taller. It’s taking photos of your growing plant in each stage of its life. It’s a marker of who you were then, and only by way of that can you know who you are now.