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Though I believe that art is a craft that is pursued in the name of exploration, the call of art itself means something even more profound to me. Its pull is telling. How could you ever begin to understand its significance in my life until I tell you? So let me tell you.
As a child, my experience being alive had something absent in it: it was the love that a child should be given unconditionally from their parents.
I knew love as a commodity. It was most inconsistent. Never could I be sure when it would come to me again. And in what form? Infrequent, and unreliable? This truth, and what the scarcity of it did to me, rendered me a person incomplete. Empty within my soul, and irrefutably living with a heavy heart. Nevertheless, as the clever child I was, I thought, “What could I do to make love stay, if it’s always quick to flee?” “What could I do to make myself be noticed, admired, and recognized?” “What could I do make love want to stay around longer? Truly see me?” I did what any desperate child would do in such a circumstance: I adapted to the environment around me in order to obtain that love.
How would I choose to do that? I sought to hone my skills in hopes that if I could mimic the look of my father, he could finally love me more than himself.
If you’ve read my blogs before, you’re probably familiar with my background and the story of how I became an artist, but this particular blog post is much more vulnerable than the one before. This one goes more in depth. This is about a journey which originally started so that I could earn the love of someone else, that somehow ended up serving me instead.
Time passed living like this. Day after day, I fell deeper into my obsession with art, clinging onto its presence in my life like an arm. I justified it as so – art was a part of me now. I needed it to survive. Art had become a pure extension of who I was. You could find me neglecting my studies in order to finish making new art pieces. Teachers that were concerned about my performance at school would call my parents, but of course, my parents wouldn’t answer those calls. There were many times where I would skip meals so that I could make time for to creating new art that was better than my past attempts. My sleep was sacrificed, too, in the name of my relentless race towards perfection.
I grew in my craft, enhancing my artistic capabilities. How tragic would it turn out to be that after all of this progression, in spite of all the dedication that I poured into the cause, I would eventually discover over an extended period of time that no matter how much I improved in my craft, the brief moments attention that it had granted me with my father were incredibly lackluster, to say the least. All quickly fleeting, still drunken. Devoid of what I was craving. Every interaction was still about him. Damn it!
So they never were enough for me. I lied to myself for a long time that they could be. Without the lie I that I was telling myself, what was all of this for? The truth could no longer be ignored.
Though my art had improved quite a lot, and I’d done well to fill the shoes of my father, metaphorically speaking, my life-long grand plan to earn my parents’ attention did not turn out quite as I had expected it to. On the contrary, it bore very little fruit, and I was left feeling even more hollow than when I first started my artistic venture.
Could anything remain for me in this life? Well, at the art that I created had.
I began to see that the love I told myself I needed to work for was actually something that I’d been giving to myself all along. All of those hours I’d spent drawing, were hours of attention that I’d been investing into MYSELF.
All of the patience that I had to allot to my lack of mastery, all of the forgiveness that I had to give to my frustration, and the grace I had to bestowed upon my inferiority. These were all chances that I lent to my future self. Unbeknownst to me, I’d been teaching myself valuable skills that I probably never would have learned if I had not convinced myself that I was worth fighting for. My father may not have thought so, or my mother, but deep down inside, I must have thought so.
That’s why I know I love art so much, and why I can never live without it now. It’s one of the very few spaces in my life where love always shows up. Never do I fear its potential lack of attendance nor suspect its eventual absence. It stays with me the entire time that I am drawing; and when I inevitably tire, it stays with me long after I’m exhausted. A true kindred spirit. I can rely on that love for myself to always follow alongside me on whatever journey I decide to take. Even on days where I feel like the art is just not happening, I know that love is still with me. Some days I tell myself that I must push through my burnout in order to stay consistently creative for outside audiences, but it won’t allow me to do so. It’s gently requesting that I take a rest. I know it’s not abandoned me.
This love encourages my growth, and continues to nourish my soul evermore.
When I first appeared in the world as Hira Hayami, I really DID want people to like me. So, I scrolled through social media platforms with insane levels of caution and chose my words very carefully. I didn’t realize it at first, but for a short time, I’d let myself fall into the very same trap that I had in the beginning. See the pattern? Like with my father.
Perhaps I was too fixated on breaking into the community and making a name for myself. I wanted to be well-received, praised for my artistic work so I could leave an impression that would stay with people long after I was logged out of my social media accounts.
I know better now.
The difference now is that I’m not scared of what I used to be. I used to think “I should be professional enough and not show my weakness so that potential publishers want to help bring my visions to life.” or “I should remain collected online so that other individuals or companies may want to work with me in the future.” But I think my anxieties almost made me make a terrible mistake in my ambitions. I make mistakes, but I am true.
You can see on my social media accounts that I truly am a very cheery, positive, and supportive person. That IS truth. I am. However, my main fear is that some voices online would see my dark and grotesque themes for their surface value. Misconstruing my messages, they’d go off and slander my name by trying to convince the masses that I’m an insensitive soul - some kind of simple, sadistic creative. How silly would that be, huh? The best way to avoid this misconception, I decided, is for me to… well, always be authentic and upfront.
Sure, if I am vulnerable online in my videos, my blogs, and my art projects, it is going to be assuredly easier for strangers on the internet to hurt me by saying nasty and untrue things about my character and intentions, but at least I will know and anyone who is truly a fan of my content will KNOW that those things they have to say about me and my intentions are not true, because I’ve already been open and honest about these things. It’s not out of naivety that I take this approach. It’s the opportunity.
My stories are grim in nature, and here’s why: I love the idea of cautionary tales. I also enjoy exploring why we perceive the controversial topics in life as controversial in the first place. What do they really mean? I ask myself, “Why do we leave some things unsaid? Is it really to our benefit? If not to our benefit, does it go to someone else, then? Must there be such things as losing battles? Are we not led by our fears?” etc. I use art to investigate why we might be afraid of such things.
I love fleshing out the imperfections I see others’ relationships, even the ones I experience in my own relationships. It’s so fascinating to me! I have understand to more about the nuances and complexities of humanity and the soul itself. Why? Because I know that love is imperfect. It’s mysterious… how crazy is it that somehow, in some way, shape, or form, it always show up anyway? Imperfect, yet undying. Even when we think that there’s none left. These curiosities of mine are at the heart of why I feel compelled to create these series for you and I.
My love for art started out with good intentions. All I wanted was to feel loved and adored by my parents (as I should have been anyway). That wish, that longing for their love was channeled in the wrong direction. If not in the wrong direction, then maybe for the wrong reasons.
Love is so much like this, for both good and bad actors alike. It’s hard for me to believe that real, pure evil is common in this world. (Though, not impossible.) The conflicts we feel within ourselves along with the tensions that we face whenever we are pit against one another, the breakdowns we experience in a number of different relationships in our lives; it’s in the moments where we lose touch with reality.
These moments I’m describing, they… they themselves are nuanced. What’s “good” and what’s “bad” is very hard to determine. What’s “right” from what’s “wrong” is very hard to define. We THINK it’s easy, naturally. It’s entirely too easy to judge one another, because we are so good at it ourselves.
What I went through as a child, it convinced me that I was unworthy of love. It made me think that relationships could only eventually lead to doom because I would never learn how to love properly. What a ridiculous idea! You see, because I already knew how to love. I’d been loving myself this whole time, I just didn’t know it. I’d been focusing too hard on the parts of myself that I thought were failing to keep love around. When, in reality, I was failing to recognize all of the good qualities that I had managed to foster all on my own, by just being myself. With myself.
The most damned thing about this whole tragedy? It is our fears that we could never love another human being correctly that invites more devastation into our lives than any plain ignorance ever could. Don’t you see the danger in that?
I think… that if we all could take the time to study other people and give them a chance, hell - give ourselves a chance – understanding that even if the conversations between each other are hard, even if the way forward into peace and a brighter tomorrow seems wildly uncertain and absurdly impossible, we would do best to let our initial judgments take less priority over our assumptions. Our pains, our fears, could mean nothing in the awe of the light. We could overcome these trials together. We’d come to see that we already have so much there to love.
I think that it’s important to say the most vulnerable things one could ever say, no matter the cost.
I am aware that people won’t always choose to stay nearby, and I most certainly know that people can’t last forever. For me, in light of this truth, this means that I am going to continue saying whatever I feel I need to say, under any and every guise.
I could not bear to live such a life where I knew there was more I could have said. I held my tongue, why? Because I was afraid? That doesn’t sound like a very good reason to me. How could that possibly benefit anyone? Have we all missed the point so badly?
For the record, I will always invite someone's imperfect presence into my life over a “perfect” love which could never let me in. I have been imperfect all my life. Love IS imperfect. And we all make mistakes. We are just figuring each other out. I wish my parents had felt the same way... about me. About each other.
Many times throughout my life, they’d just run out on our family for whatever reason. Underneath it all, I suspect they must have been carrying a heavy burden of shame with them, among other things. Maybe they couldn’t look me in the eyes anymore.
Could things have been different if we all understood one another?
Either way, love finds a way.
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