Pretending to be Normal

when you're just a weirdo artist doing your thing

Sometimes in community (even around other artists), we multidisciplinary artists can feel like we’re floundering, title-less, and directionless.

It just seems so easy to have a single title for what we do with our days.

Say, like being an abstract painter. Or a cook.

Wow. That’s so nice and tidy! Quick to say, easy to catch onto.

On a bad day, caught unawares, you might find yourself realizing with cold dread, that you don’t know what you are… your brain seems to be spinning on overtime yet you can’t even think of one thing you’ve ever created, and you may start to search your soul asking, “What do I even spend my time on??? What is my purpose on this plane of existence?”

Truth is you probably are typically pretty solid in yourself. At home, singing in the shower you feel dazzling even. You just hadn’t practiced being normal in a while.

Some of us just don’t have it in us to be normal.

We’re weird.

We live by strange hours and patterns (if you can call them that…) and we may not seem practical. Or “responsible”.

Money may not be our main motivator, therefore sacrificing our precious time on this planet seems wasted in a hamster wheel.

Anyone seen Rose Island on Netflix?

Giorgio Rosa was an Italian Engineer who could not do normal. Dreaming of a place where he could have total freedom, he and his friend Maurizio built a floating platform on the ocean just outside the Italian borders. A German club promoter named Rudy helped them popularize the island as a destination for party-goers and freedom-seekers, and as Giorgio sought to have the island recognized as an independent state, they received letters from across Europe and the United States, asking for citizenship.

Turns out a lot of people can’t do normal.

(I won’t give away anymore of the story - it’s worth a watch.)

When we’re driven by strange desires like to build a tiny independent nation in the middle of the ocean… we should follow them.

We’ve seen and felt the payoff for acting normal… job insecurity, exhaustion from wearing a mask, depletion of life force from depriving our creativity… it’s really not worth it.

All we can do is lean into our strangeness, and see who else wants to get on board.