I have a philosophy. I say, life is a canvas. When we're born, it's already shaped in some weird way: it has its curves and contours built in. The raw cotton is stretched out towards a hazy horizon. At the first breath, the canvas' surface is empty, clear. Then life begins. The canvas starts filling up with strange, perhaps uneven primer. Oil primer, acrylic primer, warm primer or cold. Your mother holds you in her arms.
In comes the unchosen paint, forced forms you had no say in. Things are happening in your life, happening to you. You don't have any control. Often the shapes and colors are agreeable. Often they're not. Then, as you grow, you start adding colors and shapes yourself. You start to define your life, paint your canvas. You adjust to the given contours. Perhaps you choose to just paint right over the unchosen disagreeable marks, pretend they're not there. Or maybe you paint around them. Maybe you just let them be.
But what seems to happen to all of us humans is this. There's always going to be at least one big black gash in your canvas. A huge gaping hole. A shape you definitely didn't want. A shape that makes you want to vomit, squeeze yourself into a ball on the floor, shake until you fall asleep, scream, cry, punch a hole in the wall. But here's the thing. Here's the goddamn thing. You always, no matter what, keep painting on that canvas for as long as you're breathing. You figure out you can't just paint over that gash. It keeps showing through. You might let it sit, get infected. It might start growing, destroying the pictures you drew next to it – fluffy clouds, freshly mowed grass, transcendent bars of color, your favorite tattoo, the poem your dad used to read to you. All shredded away next to a festering wound.
But you don't want that, do you? So you find your will. You have to find your goddamn will. You have to embrace it, the wound. You say, yes, yes, this gash is here and here to stay. You radically accept it, you take it for your own. You even choose to paint more black around it. You make it into a circular shape, maybe. And you realize the shade of black can be sort of blue, perhaps layered in thin turpentine filled strokes, almost undulating in its depth. You decide to get out of your ball on the scratchy carpet in your room. You decide to stand up, grab a paintbrush, and start painting yellow petals around this new black circle. Slowly, you make it around the circumference. And then you draw a green stem in the same color of your grandmother's eyes.
You stand back. You see the sunflower you painted. You realize the gash that has turned into one beating heart.
So this is my story. This is my story of the black gash and my sunflower. I'm still in the process of painting, and I'm not even sure I'll ever finish. But hey, as my Dad likes telling people who shit on his Facebook-posted iPad drawings, at least I'm trying.