There’s quite a difference between not conforming and not being able to conform.
On reflection – there’s a glare – every momentous mistake ever made was when he was trying to do what he thought other folks wanted or needed or demanded.
Or it was just that time in life. What was expected.
Or he was drunk, she was pretty. Didn’t always use his brain. Whatever.
As the philosopher Jimbo Fisher has said, “Ain’t nobody cares what happens to people in the past.
“That’s why I always tell our guys, your windshield is ten times bigger than your rear view mirror.
“What matters is your future.”
Here he is, Fall 1985. Buttoned down, pin-striped. Fred Meyer marketing. Oh, the horror…
Truths change. Stories are what happen between truth’s ever-changing incarnations. Misfits tell the best stories because our very lives depend on navigating an ever-changing reality.
Quite often, misfits turn into artists of one sort or another. Making art is the most intense form of expression available to humans, and it is a real place where a misfit can not only exist, but also find community without judgment. Artists are very good at stepping into and owning their misfit natures, because we want to live at the edges of culture, since the center didn’t make any sense to us and made us feel ugly or fat or stupid or crazy or weird or deviant or unwelcome. Art is a kind of cultural medicine. Sometimes, for example, when you give juvenile offenders a canvas or a blank page or a musical instrument and let them access self-expression, their self-destruction begins to change and even fall away. Not always, but sometimes. – Lidia Yuknavitch
The old man wondered just who she was calling a juvenile offender.
Secret. Get closer. Closer.
Making art might keep you sane. Making art might help you stay sane enough to keep you out of jail.
Making art might even keep you out of the booby hatch.
Although there’s some artsy shit in psych wards.
Or, so I’ve been told.
Almost forgot the secret. Making art won’t always pay the bills.
So, you comb your hair and get up and show up and hope to get back home without killing anybody.
Do the same thing tomorrow. And the day after that.
But after that, what?
Maybe he just didn’t have the balls.
Never too late not to fit in.
Lidia Yuknavitch: The Time I Snuck Into Ken Kesey’s Fiction Class