On Being Authentic

'They' told me... "Carol, you have so much potential."

The sorrow which resides in my heart comes from my attempts to live a normal life. All my useless attempts to shape myself into giving the appearance of fitting in when trying to live up to potential which was never really defined for me, a concept which was far too obscure for me to grasp. This left me with the feeling that I was given a complicated puzzle and it was my obligation to figure it out and if I was smart enough I'd come up with the correct solution. And I was told that if I lived my life the way most people live, (inside the box) I'd find the happiness and security which fitting in seemed to give most people. For the most part I lived much of my life outside of the box while pretending to live inside the box. 'Living' this way caused me to experience immense conflict because I wasn't being authentic, and being authentic was always important to me.

I sit here still puzzled with my life, bewildered by my own existence and shocked with the discovery that there was more than just one solution to the puzzle.

Update 2009: I wrote the above a few years ago and while I'm no longer bewildered by my existence but I continue do find myself drifting in a sea of bewilderment.

Something I've been thinking about lately. My youngest brother lives his life in the shallow end of the pool, so to speak. Which is fine with me, whatever makes his life bearable is what's important, we all do what we have to do to survive. But back to my brother. We were having an unfriendly conversation when he looked at me with contempt and said "Carol just once try to get out of that depth, come up out that deep place where you've always lived." My brother was telling me that he sees my intelligence as being a character defect, a personality flaw. Yet I've always envied my brother for being able to shut off his feelings and thoughts when it was too intense for him. My brother's comfortable in his snug box and I think that if he ever stepped out of his box he'd end up in a psychiatric hospital. As I once said... reality has a way of slapping one senseless.



-Carol Brown ©

Gift from Sally

Vanderbilt By The Hudson



Beautiful Watercolor by my friend Sally Mericle

Link to Sally's website

The Cats of Mirikitani

Last week I watched the documentary regarding the beautiful artist Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani which was presented by Independent Lens and I have continued thinking about Jimmy and the Japanese people who were sent to the internment camps following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Jimmy's beautiful face had me mesmorised and the images he painted to express his life story deeply moved me. Oh how I'd love to have a piece of art created by Jimmy Mirikitani, even one of his unfinished sketches or just a doodle would make my heart sing.



"Jimmy Mirikitani grew up in Hiroshima survived the Japanese American internment camps in California and was living on the streets of New York by the time the World Trade Center came down. Perhaps it's ironic, or sad, that he is an artist whose main message is peace. But how did Mirikitani end up on the streets of Manhattan and what amazing secrets are hidden in his past? This is an amazing portrait of the man, but also a fascinating example of the process of documentary filmmaking. What started as the filmmaker's interest in the peaceful artist blossomed into something neither of them would have ever expected."

Two of Jimmy Mirikitani's paintings of the Tule Lake internment camp.






Jimmy Mirikitani's painting, Mother and Baby.




DVD image from The Cats of Mirikitani
(Jimmy's beautiful face)



"Make Art Not War"



Link: Tule Lake Scrapbook