We are afraid of feeling emotions that we are uncomfortable with. Mostly the ones we never learned to maneuver through or even acknowledge exist. Anything that pushes us out of our convenience or comfort areas will get a bad review. Here I am talking about art. Any form of art, literary, visual, or musical, will always impact varied humans differently. We all carry various traumas and life lessons that influence our outlook and reactions. But art is not about reacting. Art is about responding. Art expects you to think, feel, realize, and then give a view. And if it is truly great art, it will inspire you as well.
I am trying to say that we all are bound to react to art differently depending on our personalities, experiences, and ability to process emotions. Art pushes boundaries of sentiments and our emotional capabilities—the ones we don’t have or don’t acknowledge. Any art, visual, audible, or written word, will inspire us somehow. It is on the individual what you take from it and how you grow with it. In the past few weeks, I have realized that I have always loved listening to painful emotional music. Anything that suggests a layered emotional turmoil gets me going. And this has been the case since I was a kid. I remember listening to ‘Nothing Compares to You.’ Screaming the lyrics into a pretend microphone. Because it made me feel beyond what I usually felt, that is what attracted me to the song. It is such a great piece of music that even then, as 11 years old, it would bring me to tears. I still listen to it for different reasons now. It is a great song, one of the best. Sinead O’Connor’s voice can zone you out of your reality. And that is what music has always done for me. It is unfailingly transporting me out of my current situation into something better most of the times.
However, returning to talking about ‘overlooked’ emotions, I believe we are a world full of people living through sadness and traumas. Yet many don’t like acknowledging its existence. According to them, the more you talk about it, the more your brain gets sucked into the sadness. But here is my thought, if I feel the same emotion as when I first read a book three years ago? Doesn’t that mean that I still need to learn something about myself? That I haven’t learned the lesson or how to process those emotions. Moreover, what if I re-read the book and learn something completely new that my brain wasn’t developed enough to recognize. And believe me that has happened in the past. Whenever I watch a movie about female trauma, it triggers a different kind of anxiety in me. Not the usual where my heart beats faster, my stomach coils up, and my body stiffens, unable to move. This anxiety is different; it makes me even more wary of people around me. I get angrier and behave more cynically. And this has been the case for years. I believe this happens because I know the atrocities on women that used to be a thing of the ancient times still occur today in 2023 without any or maybe a little change. I am, in fact, even more, untrusting of people around me. And therefore, when I watch such movies, it is a reminder to my brain that I have no control over these issues. However hard, I try to remind myself that it is changing, my girls are growing up in a better world, but I never sit through this kind of art without reliving my own trauma and agitated angst. I guess this is why sometimes, art does not get the recognition it truly deserves, because they stir up so much inside an otherwise oblivious human being. It is easier to reject a piece of art as worthless, sad, outdated, or even ugly; than to work on our empty minds and hearts.
And now, my own tiny poem inspired by the one my daughter wrote, about a painting.
A silent observer
Attention seeker
Loud and obnoxious
Pretty with colors
Hanging by itself, no one to talk
Staying alert
Hoping for someone to notice.
Black Coffee and Grey Stories 