It has been a year since I read Trisha Low's Socialist Realism: and two years since I was assigned to read her first book, The Compleat Purge in a humanities course at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, titled Agony and Protest instructed by Patrick Durgin. I was 18 and had just moved myself to Berlin to fulfill an urge to leave Chicago which had been lingering since what feels like birth.
Twenty-one years ago I was born in Northwestern Women's Hospital in what was and still is one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Chicago. Upon exiting my mother's body I inhaled amniotic fluid and popped a hole in my left lung. Growing up there were scars on my side left by the incisions from sewing my lung back together. Those scars faded by the time I was 11 years old when my breast tissue came in right before my first period on December 3rd.
It feels like I've always been trying to get out of Chicago. Whether I knew it or not. As if my way of entering this world wasn't sign enough. When I was young, those scars were my reminder, now I'm left to recount the story as if I was at all conscious to recall it.
Before taking Patrick's class and being introduced to Trisha Low's work, I was not sure I had ever been properly influenced by my education. This came right at the time of starting my own blog. While living in Berlin, not knowing anyone, I spent what seemed like every day writing by the spree.
By the time I left Chicago, I was wrapping up my second year of college, and my first durational performance: being canceled on purpose. Simultaneously, as one of our final assignments in class, Patrick had us read an archived blog post of Trisha's, "Trisha Low on Performing Being Hated". I had never read something that almost felt like it came out of a more fluent version of my brain. I always dreamed of a machine that could read my mind and translate my thoughts in a way that I was unable to verbalize. This piece did exactly that for me. I had been struggling to articulate why I was canceling myself and how it felt so important to perform online.
I have always been so fascinated with what it means to force evolution upon oneself and what it means to transform for the pleasure or satisfaction of others. Allowing others to fill up their own cup, and jerk themselves off with dopamine through hating me. Trisha Low perfectly summed up everything I had felt in such a way it almost seemed too good to be true; too psychic.
I could continue on forever about what her work has done for me. But for now, this is what I've got.
Sometimes I forget I wrote a book. I would love to share it I'm just not yet sure how. Maybe that will be the goal for 2025.
Anyway,
Here I am, 2 years later. With a degree from SAIC, begging and pleading for something to satisfy me as simply reading and writing did 2 years ago. I could have never imagined that two years later I would be here. I'm still not sure how I feel about this, though I don't think I even considered my future self back then, I still might not. Sometimes I worry that I could be stuck in the past but my recollection of it isn't the most genuine either.
This is the first time in my life that I have been so unsure of what is next. I hope I can begin finding joy in these circumstances, but for now, I will sulk in it. After all, there is something to be said about what pain can bring.
FAME HURTS
