Crushed & Lifted

This diptych came to me the same way all good art ideas come to me: I felt it coming on like a wave.

I saw somebody with their eyes bulging, getting crushed by a giant arm. And then I thought, “Oh, I like the imagery of a huge hand descending from the sky. What about a hand holding somebody, helping them ascend into the sky?”

I love that.

I love duality. I love symbolism. I love visual storytelling.

And it also comes at a very serendipitous time, as just about everything seems to for me.

So hey, maybe I’m just a magical thinker. Or maybe I just like to wax intellectual about magical thinking all day long. That is still to be determined.

But this one comes at a time when I’ve been thinking a lot about relationships. Maybe I always am, but lately it feels like I’m truly exiting the remnants and behaviors of my twenties. Some of the people from that period of my life are falling by the wayside, while a new crop of people, and a new way of behaving in relationships, is coming into my life.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how people make me feel. I’ve been thinking about how I show up in relationships. And I’ve become increasingly aware of how trapped I can feel in certain relationship cycles.

I’m thinking about who I can and can’t be around certain people. How I can express myself. How I can’t express myself. How much of myself I feel like I’m allowed to bring to the table.

And I’m trying to gravitate more toward the relationships that prop me up rather than push me down.

Not for a selfish reason. This isn’t about never wanting to feel unpleasant feelings, and it certainly isn’t about judging anybody.

It’s more about something I’ve been thinking about while reading Necessary Endings. To paraphrase the idea from the book, we want to get as much as we can out of life. We want to feel as good as we can. We want to feel affirmed, understood, appreciated, and gotten. We want to uplift, and we want to be uplifted.

We don’t want to be put down, and we don’t want to put people down.

And the book makes an interesting distinction: we aren’t necessarily just pruning relationships because they’re toxic. Sometimes we’re pruning relationships that simply aren’t helping us become better.

We’re making room for better to come in.

I don’t know about you, but I have spent a lot of my life feeling like somebody wanted me to be less than, whether that was intentional or not.

I don’t really like pointing fingers. I don’t really like making a fuss out of these kinds of things. So whether feeling less than in somebody’s presence is a matter of objective truth or simply my perception is, in some ways, irrelevant.

I think we need to trust our intuition when we consistently feel less than around certain people.

And sometimes there isn’t even anybody to blame.

Sometimes a season is simply over.

Maybe we’ve learned or taken all we can from someone at this particular point in our lives. And by pruning the flower now, maybe we’re actually making room for a better connection with that same person somewhere down the road.

So this isn’t necessarily about who’s coming and who’s going.

It’s about maintaining a consistent awareness of who we want to be around, who we want to become, and how we want our relationships to make us feel.

And I want to emphasize something else, too.

We are not just the people getting crushed.

We are not just the people being raised up.

We are also doing the crushing.

We are also doing the raising.

I never want to express myself from the perspective of a victim, or from the perspective of somebody who doesn’t take full responsibility for their part in the reality of a situation. Relationships are reciprocal. We affect people just as much as they affect us.

Maybe that’s part of the duality I was drawn to in this image in the first place.

One hand can crush.

One hand can lift.

And sometimes, depending on where we are in our lives, we are the person underneath the hand. Other times, we’re the hand.

Anyway, this drawing came to me, and I thought it was beautiful.

I hope you enjoy it.

Xoxo

SMH