The Story of All This Pt. 4
You know that feeling when you see a dream starting to happen? I was euphoric and terrified all over again. Because now, I had to go ahead and write the book and create the art. Could I really do it? Would they like it? Had I been deluding myself? Would I be able to do the other nearly two hundred pages as well as I did the first eight? For a year, I lived on edge, thinking that, at any moment, the dream could burst, the publisher could reconsider. I emotionally yo-yoed around until I finally accepted that, if the book was supposed to be in the world, it would be in the world – whether it was now or ten years from now or forty years from now. I quit working at the clothing store and paid off some of my debt with money a friend lent me. While I wrote and worked on the book, I took independent classes through the California College of Arts and Crafts, working with Opal Palmer Adisa and the photographer Chris Johnson, who was mentored by Imogene Cunningham and Ansel Adams and now was mentoring me.
And, I began teaching that art course for kids, rooting the book deeper and deeper in what I was learning from them. At times, it was very challenging, because some of the kids had a lot of pain. And I might show up for class feeling completely insecure and pathetic and awful myself. I’d say, “Well, I’m feeling insecure and pathetic today, can we just lie on the tables for a little while?” I tried to be honest about myself instead of pretending. I was simply Sabrina, with her highs and lows. And I was astonished by how vulnerable the kids became, even the boys. When I was in junior high school, guys made fun of me. It hurt – a lot. So, I was made whole in a way by seeing that the badass boys in my art class were, themselves, wounded. They felt things deeply. Being a badass came out of conditioning, out of pain. It wasn’t personal. A 10-year-old boy, wrote “People crave to be loved, to be liked by one another. Sometimes people go to the borders of life, everybody will do what it takes to be normal.”
These children made me cry. A beautiful, blond girl – the kind of girl I was terrified of at that age – said, “I’ve created my own prison and now I have to exist in it.” What we don’t let out traps us. We think, No one else feels this way, I must be crazy. So we don’t say anything. And we become enveloped by a deep loneliness, not knowing where our feelings come from or what to do with them. Why do I feel this way? Last week, I was on top of the world and now my feelings don’t make sense. Voicing it, getting it out and letting other people hear it, helps to dissipate it. The fears and self-criticisms begin to leak. And we begin to heal. In the same way, if we feel deeply about something and voice it, then we’re made whole by standing up for ourselves and what we believe.
Over and over, I hear people say how grateful they are that I speak about these kinds of things, because they feel the same way. When I wonder why on earth I wrote Spilling Open, I think of them. And I think of my favorite writers, people who have let me in on their own personal processes, women like May Sarton and Anais Nin. What if they hadn’t written their books? What if I hadn’t had them to turn to when I felt so alone? Maybe someone will pick up Spilling Open when they’re feeling lonely or confused. Maybe it will help them to feel a part of what we all feel. I don’t claim to know the answers to life, but I claim to feel it.
Spilling Open, was my catharsis and it continues to be a work-in-progress for me. Being human. Being real. Letting other people be real, be vulnerable. I often felt naked writing it in the moment rather than waiting and gaining perspective, reflecting and designing my experience to look the way I want it to look. Even in the process of creating the art and rewriting the material, I noticed things that I’d worked through since I first wrote about them. Parts of the book I can’t believe I put in there. Some of the more vulnerable things, insecurities, are hard for me to read now. My critical voices scold, Sabrina, that’s not important to talk about, no one else feels that, take it out!, even though I know it’s something I wish someone had talked about when I was that age. It’s real. May Sarton said, “The deeper you go, the more universal you become.” It’s a reminder to me that those things I try to convince myself I don’t need to admit are usually the things I need the most to say. Speaking the truth, in its most poignant details, is liberating and gives those around us the freedom to be real. SARK reminds me that the ultimate goal is radical self-acceptance. Get into who you are.
In my book, I write about a photographer named Elizabeth Sunday, who said, “I believe in myself. I believe in my vision, my life, my talent, my art more than anyone. No one can take that away from me.” We can choose to be affected by the world or we can choose to affect the world. I never passed algebra, I’m not good at games involving balls being thrown or kicked towards me. For years, I struggled with all that I wasn’t. But seeing and believing in who I truly am has given me an unstoppable faith and conviction in what I can do with my life.
In Spilling Open, I write, “I think when I can get to that place of self-acceptance and a sense of calm assurance in who I genuinely am, if I can believe in who I am, what I need, what I deserve and what I must express, then I can let go of the struggle of self-acceptance based on their approval of my beauty, boobs, thighs, or sketchbooks. I will dare to do just what I do. Be just what I am. And dance whenever I want to.”