There were good things

There Were Good Things

I was struggling just to live and I never noticed the painting on the wall.

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That sounds like a metaphor. It isn’t. There was actually a painting. Several of them. The woman who let me live with her was a working artist — the kind whose work ends up in galleries, who gets invited to speak at colleges, who is still making beautiful things in her late eighties. I didn’t think much about it then. I didn’t think much about anything except the next problem in front of me.

Years later I mentioned her name to an artist I met in LA. A guy in his forties, knew what he was talking about. He stopped and looked at me like I’d said something impossible. You lived with her? Yeah. Actually lived there? Yeah. He couldn’t get past it. And I remember standing there thinking — was that a big deal?
It was a big deal.

I just didn’t know it yet.

I was eighteen sitting in my friend’s parents house with his father, a stockbroker the day the market crashed in 1987.

I wasn’t stable yet. I was still trying to get my footing, still trying to figure out what normal even looked like.

Everyone was panicking except him. He was calm in a way that didn’t make sense to me then. I never asked why. I just watched. If I’d had even a fraction more awareness I would have leaned over and said — how are you not falling apart right now?

That answer alone could have changed something in me.

Another time I sat watching my friend’s father, a doctor, studying an echocardiogram. The image of a heart moving on the screen. The sounds it made. I had no idea what I was looking at but something about it pulled at me. I didn’t ask a single question. I just sat there like furniture.

Those were just two moments. There were others. But the one that stays with me the most, the one I keep coming back to, is the artist whose house I lived in.

She offered to make me a painting once. I ruined that. Things fell apart because of me, because I was sixteen and careless and I blew it. The painting isn’t the point though. I don’t lie awake thinking about a painting. I lie awake thinking about all the questions I didn’t ask. All the times I could have just stood in front of her work and tried to understand what I was seeing. She would have probably told me.

People who make beautiful things usually want someone to care about them.

I didn’t know how to care about things that weren’t emergencies yet.

That’s what nobody tells you about struggling — not the obvious hard parts, but this: it narrows your vision down to the immediate. You miss things. Not just small things. Extraordinary things. People doing real work right next to you and you’re looking past them because you’re trying to figure out where you’re sleeping tonight.

Here’s where I have to be honest with myself though. And this is the hard part.

Some of what I missed — the cult did that. They took my early years and filled them with fear and control and rules that had nothing to do with the real world. That’s on them. I don’t forgive it. I won’t.

But some of it? That’s on me. I was standing in rooms full of people doing extraordinary things and I chose not to reach for it.

I could have asked the stockbroker one question. I could have asked the doctor what he was seeing. I could have stood in front of those paintings and just looked. Nobody was stopping me.
Except something was. Something the cult had put inside me a long time before those moments ever happened.

And here’s what really tears at me: there are people who came up worse than I did. People with less, people with more pain, people with fewer chances. However when a moment showed up, they seized it. They reached. They became great because something in them said — I have the right to want this.

I had that thing in me too. I just never believed I was allowed to use it.

That’s the difference. Not greatness. Permission. The cult took mine every single day. They taught me that I was nobody. That my curiosity didn’t count. That wanting things — real things, beautiful things, things that had nothing to do with survival — was not for someone like me. And I believed them. For years I believed them. I stood in rooms full of extraordinary people and kept my mouth shut because somewhere deep in me a voice said: who are you to ask?

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That voice wasn’t mine. It was theirs. It has always been theirs.
I’m not asking for pity about it. I’m saying look around.

Whatever you’re going through, there is probably something near you right now that is bigger than you’re giving it credit for. A person. A conversation you could start. A room you’re allowed to stand in and actually pay attention. Don’t wait until you’re older to understand what you were standing next to.

Don’t let anyone — a person, a group, a voice inside you that was never yours to begin with — convince you that your curiosity doesn’t count.

Seize it. You have the right.

Ask the question. Show up. Not to get something. Just to be there for it.

The painting would have been nice. But that’s not really what I wanted.

I just wanted to be the kind of person who believed he was allowed to ask.

— Neon.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​