A Frame For Josh
a creative writing post (#36)
Context: I’ve been drawing a lot lately, for several complicated reasons, and had a small adventure—one that led to a minor epiphany—in attempting to get one of my drawings framed. This essay is an attempt to capture that experience.
One of my dearest friends,
, turns 50 later this week.Selfishly, I claimed two hours of his birthday time. I requested this months ago. I told him I wanted to buy him lunch, just the two of us, and have him all to myself. He agreed.
Barring fire, floods, or other acts of the gods, this will make for a lovely wrapping-up of my workweek and, I hope, a happy milestone birthday memory for him.
Unconscious Motivations
My therapist would say (ahem…..did say) that I make birthday plans months in advance because I struggle to believe I can be loved without finding ways to make myself very important. That I’m so insecure about the tiny handful of people who are important to me that I tend to ask myself, “What would the best friend ever do in this situation?” and then I do that.
And, as always, that annoying bastard was right.
Well…mostly right.
Josh is also wonderful company, a presence both hilarious and soothing, and the best listener I’ve ever met. Any excuse to hang out with him is an attractive one.
But the questions linger in my mind. Of course they do. How could they not?
This is the trouble with having a real therapist, someone who holds you accountable, calls out your bullshit, and refuses to accept convenient, pat answers. Most therapists, these days, are more like paid, over-coddling friends. They make you feel better. They do not push you to grow.
I don’t have a therapist like that, for which I thank heaven as often as I cry on my way home from seeing him.
He starts from a baseline twofold belief: one, that people are very complicated and survivors of serious childhood trauma are more complicated than most; two, that people who understand themselves pretty well never reach the level of misery, anxiety, disassociation, and other symptomology that land people in a trauma specialist’s office.
So he asks hard questions. Lots of them. He points out likely unconscious motivations, forcing you to consider them consciously. This often means that more than one explanation is true at the same time and to varying degrees, typically in ways that are impossible to assign percentages to.
The Search for Certainty
I find this enormously frustrating. I’m a mathematician. I like precision, ideally to five decimal places. I want to be able to say that the reason for this or that aspect of my behavior is 97.37747% based on this normal, healthy motivation and only 2.62253% based on that other motivation, the one about my being fucked up.
But this is, of course, nearly always impossible.
People are complicated. Their motivations are usually opaque to themselves. And I’m a people. My motivations are clearer to me than they used to be, but that’s not saying much. Even on the rare occasions when I find some level of clarity about my own motivations, well, people are creatures of flux. Those percentages never stay put for long, whether I’m aware of them or not.
Besides, even when I fully recognize that I’m acting out of insecurity, I have no idea how to handle such things.
If I wait until my insecurity is conquered, or even mostly conquered, before I try for meaningful friendships? I’ll start having meaningful friendships in a retirement home. Or possibly with the Hospice nurse.
The questions sparked by my therapist’s efforts in understanding my motivations bring up even more questions. Hard ones.
Questions Worth Considering
What importance does motive really have, anyway?
If a person is fucked up in such a way that they can only do the right thing for the wrong reason, does that matter?
If it does matter….how much?
This is easy to answer in extremis. If an excellent firefighter—one who is exceptionally skilled at entering infernos and removing people alive—is an egomaniac, well, so what? If he is only good at his job because his ego needs him to be seen as a hero, do we want him out of the fire department? Surely not.
If the best surgeon available is a raging case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder who pins 100% of his self-worth on keeping a perfect, zero-death record—well, most of us, if we needed surgery, would say hip hip hooray for narcissism, would we not?
It is a lot more difficult to answer these questions on small matters.
Sometimes it’s very important for me to try, even on small matters.
Josh’s birthday, I have decided, is not one of those times.
A Friend Who Understands Me
Josh is not a mathematician, but he’s a high-IQ, deep thinker who has studied music. As a result of these things, his mind works in much the same way as a mathematician’s.
He understands the beauty of adding many parts up to get a satisfying, anxiety-reducing, perfect 100.0%.
He also understands that sometimes getting to 100.0% is not worth the trouble.
We’ve been talking a lot lately about disassociation, which he and many other people have been struggling with. He wrote about that here, and the comments are worth reading. I too have been disassociated as hell lately, far beyond what is normal for me.
I haven’t been able to try my most helpful tool for breaking disassociation, which I wrote about here, because the teenager I pay to do things like move furniture around is on a trip with his family.
What I’ve been doing, mostly, is drawing.
Josh understands what drawing means to me. He’s heard all the stories about how people who could draw were second only to people whose fathers loved them when it came to my childhood jealousy, which was chronic, and considerable.
Drawing As Mindful Presence
I love drawing. I’ve written about how and some of the why I love it, how I taught myself to draw, and the step-by-step process of making a drawing, start to finish.
I’ve finished a couple of drawings lately that I was happy with (which is uncommon), including two using a new-to-me techique called “selective coloring”, where just one aspect of an otherwise-graphite drawing is done in color.
Drawing is a helpful tool for disassociation because it requires presence, attention to detail, and full powers of observation.
Lately, the only time I feel present in my body is when I’m at my drawing table.
Josh knows this. And he knows that drawing is one of the few ways I feel secure enough to tell people I love them.
Josh’s Beautiful Hobby
One of Josh’s hobbies is the collection and use of kerosene lamps. These old-fashioned instruments of light and heat are as aesthetically pleasing as they are practical. I adore the one he gave me for Christmas a few years ago, and they are truly lovely items to draw. They are quite challenging—the curves, the reflected light, rendering 3-D glass on a 2-D page. And they are, to put it simply, extremely beautiful.
It’s an interesting exercise as an artist, to use just pencil and paper to capture it all: the old-fashioned feeling, the simplicity and elegance of the design.
Josh loves kerosene lamps, and I love to draw, especially things that are both challenging and beautiful. So what to draw for his birthday card was an easy call.
And a few days ago, when I asked Josh to pick which photo he liked best (from a few I found on Google images) for me to draw his birthday card, he knew I was asking for more than a simple aesthetic choice.
Josh is an appreciative and forgiving audience, so I didn’t worry about the fact that realistically rendering the distortion of a wick, under liquid, inside curved glass, seemed beyond my present level of ability.
I just sat down to try. I wasn’t afraid to try, because if it turned out even semi-okay, Josh would love it.
Then I stumbled across a really helpful technique when I was messing with the reference photo he chose. I used the grid template setting on the handwriting app on my iPad, drew grids across it, and then used the zoom-in feature to help me work on one square at a time.
I did some experimenting with my palette of pencils, and figured out how to do the best job I possibly could at my current skill level.
This was tricky. But as a consequence of the one-square-at-a-time approach and the experimentation, the drawing turned out far, far better than I expected it to.
Some process I don’t understand often means that my emotional state—either how I felt while drawing, or how I feel about the subject or the intended recipient—makes it into a drawing. This turned into the best drawing I’ve ever done of an inanimate object, and rivals previous portraits of my beloved grandmother and the sons of two dear friends, a married couple, for my best drawing ever, so far.
It turned out well enough, in fact, that I couldn’t bear not to frame it.
It’s still going to be Josh’s birthday card, but in a frame with a post-it note that says “Happy Birthday!” attached to the glass.
So on Sunday afternoon, I left a couple of hours before my therapy appointment, in an attempt to get it framed.
This started as a very minor errand and quickly became an adventure of the sort that is only really possible in America, several years into our post-COVID “new normal” decline.
Extra space to allow for the “unlock one post free” option that Substack offers on paywalled posts, in order to give free subs a chance to see what they’re missing.