Let me preface this by saying that no one has ever given me any indication that I need to match these essays to commonly-accepted themes or holidays. But we live in a society, and I feel the pressure. It’s spooky season! Ought I not to be writing about apple-picking or witchcraft or the thinning veil between worlds? Instead, the first things that come to my mind are unethical psychological experiments from the mid-20th century (I’ve been reading critical analysis of Milgram and Zimbardo). The scariest things I could write about right now are almost certainly things I don’t want to write about—at least, not where so many people can see. I’m afraid to be vulnerable. Things would probably be easier if I could breezily laugh off what frightens me, make light of what makes me sad. Instead, it seems I can only take certain things so gravely that it invites the puzzlement or ridicule of others. This has always been the case; as a child I was incredibly serious, to the point where some relatives made fun of it, gave me nicknames over it (“Grumpy the Third”, my predecessors being my father and grandfather).
I’ll be real with you anyway. It’s been difficult to be creative. For some reason, it’s affecting my drawing more than my writing. Maybe it has to do with the division between “left-brain” and “right-brain”, the difference between documenting and dreaming. After all, I can still hammer out this essay and maintain my daily journaling. Meanwhile, I start drawings, then lose heart partway through. The marks that I would, in the past, have turned into a fully painted and confident vision over the course of a few hours, now remain an assortment of bare bones, shaky lines, abandoned in minutes. This is not something I like to admit, not least because my livelihood depends in large part on it. In this very space, I’ve written countless times about the pleasures of consistency and the strategies I’ve found for working through difficult parts of the creative process. I still stand by those ways of working, reframing and healing. Some days, they still help me. But other days, it seems no matter how strong and flexible those structures are, they fall apart in an instant under pressure, overwhelm and stress from forces outside my control, as spiderwebs under one stroke of a relentless broom.
I am generally a hopeful person. I tend to my small corner of the universe as well as I can and pursue the glimmers of good things in life. Therefore I say the following as a statement of fact, not as a bid for pity, sympathy or well-intentioned advice: the state of the world is incredibly bleak and violent. I won’t pretend not to see it, though I flinch at times. I do what I can, or like to believe so. And, helplessly, I turn to paper and pen. At my worst, I can still create, can still enjoy the creative act while it’s happening. But the moment I stop drawing, as I stare at what I’ve made, a terrible feeling rises up, strong enough that it could be called self-loathing. To stop it from coming up off the paper, I close the notebook. From the dates penciled in the corner of each page, I can see that there are breaks of a month or more between sketches. These are not like the gaps in my 5-year journal: I left those blank as a way of relaxing and being present for events in my personal life. The emptiness in my sketchbook is different. It comes from fear, and more precisely from despair. It’s as if I’m afraid to confirm my own powerlessness and uselessness with a scribble on paper. I am afraid to create evidence that art can solve nothing, save no one.
I don’t really believe that’s true. I know that, partly thanks to journaling. Earlier this month, I ended a morning pages session with a question so loaded to me that simply writing it, let alone attempting to answer it, filled me with such a heaviness that I had to put my pen down. Doomscrolling wouldn’t help in the slightest, so I had to get as far away from my computer and phone as possible. I left my desk. I wandered over to the bookshelf looking for something immersive to take my mind off things. An hour later, I had finished reading the first volume of Naoki Urasawa’s Monster, one of my favorite comics, for probably the hundredth time. I felt…well, not great. (It’s not a cheerful story.) But my bitterness was less paralyzing. I got up for a glass of water. As I walked past my desk, I saw my notebook, lying open to the question: “What can art even do?”. I came back to my desk; I had my answer.
I write out of fear. I write in the hopes of finding myself outside of fear. In that place, as that person, it is possible to dream and draw trembling lines into something both afraid and fearless, something that may stay alive.
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Text and photos by: A.C. Esguerra
Where to find A.C. : instagram @blueludebar
Read other stories by A.C. : Here
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