Today I visited the Tate Modern for the first time since last summer.
Last summer was hard. I remember feeling so bad that I would look forward to each evening when I would finally be able to unleash the tears that I had been with holding from myself. One day, I remembered the murals and from that point it was not just a casual desire to see them sometime- it was a must.
I just had to see the murals. I wrote about it here on my blog (if I was a good blogger I'd link it here now but alas).
Never in my life have I experienced a sudden need to do something like that -- visit a place for no apparent reason (well, I realised the reason later).
When I entered that room with all the murals facing me I remember being overwhelmed with emotion and I lost the battle to my tears. They escaped as desperately as I had been fighting them back. Quickly.
Today I went to see them again but it was a different scenario. I had planned to go alone but my brother ended up tagging along. And I wasn't in as much pain when I walked into the room. The room was busy (more so than last year) and there were people taking pictures. I still felt that sense of being swept up in an abyss of colour and emotion but there was a distance that I felt from my previous summer's experience of the murals. I felt like I could look at my past self objectively from a place where things were different. I wasn't looking into the murals searching for a way out of my pain; I was looking at them having accepted the pain. My thoughts were less foggy.
That isn't to say that I don't feel similar pain and anxiety to last year. I suppose the difference is that a lot of what I was dreading last summer, I faced. Now, although I am facing more challenges ahead, I think subconsciously I know that I have sort of 'been there, done that'- written the blog post, if you will.
It's strange. I'm not sure that I will ever in my life experience that intensity so acutely when seeing the murals. I cannot tell if that is a good or bad thing but it's amazing how timing works. For the moments in which I experienced the murals, they were everything. They were the visual manifestation of everything that I had locked up inside. Everything that I wasn't saying verbally to anyone, confronted me in this abstract art form. It was liberating, poignant and for the first time in a long time it felt like I was being honest with myself (which of course is a lie; if looking at a beautiful piece of art work is how you justify not sharing your issues with someone, then you are most certainly in denial and lying to yourself. But that's another blog post).
Last summer was hard. I remember feeling so bad that I would look forward to each evening when I would finally be able to unleash the tears that I had been with holding from myself. One day, I remembered the murals and from that point it was not just a casual desire to see them sometime- it was a must.
I just had to see the murals. I wrote about it here on my blog (if I was a good blogger I'd link it here now but alas).
Never in my life have I experienced a sudden need to do something like that -- visit a place for no apparent reason (well, I realised the reason later).
When I entered that room with all the murals facing me I remember being overwhelmed with emotion and I lost the battle to my tears. They escaped as desperately as I had been fighting them back. Quickly.
Today I went to see them again but it was a different scenario. I had planned to go alone but my brother ended up tagging along. And I wasn't in as much pain when I walked into the room. The room was busy (more so than last year) and there were people taking pictures. I still felt that sense of being swept up in an abyss of colour and emotion but there was a distance that I felt from my previous summer's experience of the murals. I felt like I could look at my past self objectively from a place where things were different. I wasn't looking into the murals searching for a way out of my pain; I was looking at them having accepted the pain. My thoughts were less foggy.
That isn't to say that I don't feel similar pain and anxiety to last year. I suppose the difference is that a lot of what I was dreading last summer, I faced. Now, although I am facing more challenges ahead, I think subconsciously I know that I have sort of 'been there, done that'- written the blog post, if you will.
It's strange. I'm not sure that I will ever in my life experience that intensity so acutely when seeing the murals. I cannot tell if that is a good or bad thing but it's amazing how timing works. For the moments in which I experienced the murals, they were everything. They were the visual manifestation of everything that I had locked up inside. Everything that I wasn't saying verbally to anyone, confronted me in this abstract art form. It was liberating, poignant and for the first time in a long time it felt like I was being honest with myself (which of course is a lie; if looking at a beautiful piece of art work is how you justify not sharing your issues with someone, then you are most certainly in denial and lying to yourself. But that's another blog post).
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