After a tutorial I was angry and frustrated... the tutor told me I was being too scientific and objective about something that was essentially emotional. I had proposed a series of paintings about my mom's childhood memories, and how her parents had begun forgetting them due to their alzheimers. I talked about tau protein tangles and beta amyloids and glial cells and hippocampal density. The tutor didn't love it. After two days of stomping around, I sat down to write. It helped, and it turned out quite nice too.
Conversation lulls.
I’ve been too blunt.
I think they don't understand the biological concept I just explained.
I’m silent.
They’re waiting.
Waiting for a sort of truce between their colors and my science.
They’re waiting for me to admit something,
give them something,
reveal something more.
There isn’t more.
I’ve explained all the science.
I’ve listed my colors and materials.
The silence stiffens.
They sigh and look at me.
I clench my jaw, a bad habit.
“Are you finding this difficult?”
“No”
“I feel like you’re resistant”
“No, I just don’t have any answers yet”
“But isn’t this hard for you? It’s from personal experience no?”
“Yes its personal, but it's not hard. I’ve been going through this for years.”
“And it isn’t hard for you?”
“No”
They sigh.
I’m offended
by the softness in their eyes.
I clench my jaw.
A bad habit.
“It seems like it is... Is that why you do so much research?”
“Thats just who I am.”
“I rationalize ... and then express.”
“Do you use science to make it easier?”
“No, I just like understanding things.”
“Hmm.”
Silence.
I wipe my eyes.
“I’m sorry if this is hard for you”
“It isn’t.”
Reflection
Transcribing this dialogue honestly (with a little poetic licensce) helped me understand the conversation without being consumed by defensiveness. I learned the defensiveness came from two places, the first was the impulse to defend science (my worldview) and the second was defensiveness from a place of fear of feeling. By writing about myself, I saw myself from the outside; I was afraid of unpacking how I felt about my mother’s experience, and using neuroscience as a shield. If I delved deep into the science, I didn’t have to delve deep into the complex relationships that arose from this experience. Watching my mother lose her parents was a prediction of my future loss.
A daughter watching her mother lose her mother, and fearing the same loss years later.
After writing this and digesting it externally, I found that recognizing and naming my emotions helped me work with them. Then I surrendered to the complex feelings of generational memory loss and started painting again. Embracing memory loss, yet letting myself hurt as I painted it. Adding beauty to loss, and allowing pain to tangle with science in my work.
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