Earlier, I posted about trouble and beauty and it didn’t necessarily make a lot of sense. I didn’t mean to say that Kitty is totally losing it, because she’s not. I didn’t mean to say that beauty is only there when people suffer. Just that sometimes when people go through rough spots, and you’ve been reading their blogs, or looking at their art, you can see it reflected there in a particularly touching way. A particular beauty that disappears with the return to happiness and normalcy.
It shows up in disease-recovery blogs that get less interesting as people get better. It shows up in the funny ones, where people work out their demons through ranting and self-destructive hijinks, and then get their shit together and suddenly they’re not as acerbic or funny any more. It shows up in rock bands that quit taking drugs and start pacing themselves and decide they want to live past the age of thirty, and totally aren’t as cool anymore. It shows up in my own life, because I’m not as driven and upset and lonely as I was when I first got to Boston and would stay at work for thirty hours straight and go home and laugh because I was way too tired to sleep.
It’s not always there, of course. There’s plenty of depressed or angry or upset or drug-addled people that are boring and horrible when they’re low. Just look at LiveJournal or, god forbid, Xanga. And I don’t mean to say that creative output is worse when the creator feels better– I’ve been reading Kitty for years now and she’s great all the time. But a week or two ago, I knew she was upset. She posted pictures that remind me about how visiting home turns the familiar into the strange, and day to day life sometimes seems confusing and it made me want to cry because it reminded me about going home and things feeling inexplicably weird, or walking down the street and feeling like there’s something huge I’m just not getting.
And when people get better and that odd shine goes away, and they’re back to normal, they feel better. It’s just not as intense, and the blog readers, well, they were there for the intensity in many cases. I feel guilty for missing that intensity in blogs. I know I feel stupid for missing it in my own life. I miss being depressed sometimes, because it gave me a clearer sense of who I was. I was a person with a mental illness trying to get through the day, not some fucking yuppie who’s medicated away his emotions and is incapable of feeling empathy for anyone, not even kittens.
Anyway. I don’t mean to patronize or imply that things are, in fact, always beautiful when they are damaged, broken, or falling apart, or even when they’re in rough seas. Just that sometimes, beauty shows itself off in a new light when the world around it gets ugly.
Secretly Ironic 