self-expression

The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.

There is no great reward for being emotionally withdrawn, no pity prize for bottling your frustration. No one is coming to congratulate your chronic self-repression. By opening up, maybe you will inconvenience some people. Maybe you will trigger some conflict. Maybe you will be rejected, criticized, judged. Everything comes with a price and everything has its compensation. Authenticity may require pain, but it also opens the doors to joy, creativity, self-respect, empathy. Self-repression, on the other hand, costs you all the beauty of the world in exchange for a prison of comfort. Is it really worth it? Isn't it time to break free?

Compassion is essential, but it__ not a substitute for self-expression, or self-respect, or self-compassion. Emotional self-care is also essential, but gently soothing our wounds does not replace communicating about them.

Inherent in every living thing is an insatiable hunger, the innate desire to express life by freely and fully being __hat_ it was uniquely created to be. To personalize this, consider the possibility that there was a time when you were a __hat_ before you were a __ho._ If you can wrap your mind around that possibility, then, the question to explore is, what were you before you became a who__nd why did you become the who you uniquely are when there are so many other __ho__ on the planet you might have been? While this may seem like a bit of a paradoxi- cal tongue twister, it is the quintessential question that requires exploration if you are to follow your true North Star back to your point of origin, where you__l find your authentic self waiting to weave itself into the fabric of your human life today and every day.

If everybody likes you, you are doing it wrong.

When you have lived your life under such dominant image-leadership, its pressures put a certain invisible English on the cue ball of your development: It influences all of your ideas about who you should be, all the ways in which you become yourself.

Never shall a young man,Thrown into despairBy those great honey-colouredRamparts at your ear,Love you for yourself aloneAnd not your yellow hair.

I refuze (refuse) to allow society to dictate my limitations.

I be wanting to speak on stuff sometimes, but Spirit be like, "Leave that shit alone, hear?" And I be like, "Yes, ma'am.

In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.

I let my love for all flow through art, and I express how I feel.

Telling the story, acknowledging what has happened and how you feel, is often a necessary part of forgiveness.

Happiness is part of who we are. Joy is the feeling

I like to quote Shakespeare. But in this case, the rapper Eminem said it best: Words are a motherfucker.

Her thoughts are full of other things just now; and people have such different ways of showing feeling: some by silence, some by words.

Art gives those unexpressed parts of ourselves permission to be felt and spoken.

My art is largely made up of my pain; re-framed, redesigned and re-purposed. It's a mutually beneficial experience for both the creator and the beholder. Transformative healing is a beautiful process.

I have no sympathy with the belief that art is the restricted province of those who paint, sculpt, make music and verse. I hope we will come to an understanding that the material used is only incidental, that there is artist in every man; and that to him the possibility of development and of expression and the happiness of creation is as much a right and as much a duty to himself, as to any of those who work in the especially ticketed ways.