Crushed by the Weight of Normal.
When I was younger…. yes, I can actually say that now, I was pissed off by normal.
Normal town, normal people, normal people’s problems. I think you get the idea. I was even angry at beautiful art. Maybe even “normal” art. Psssht.
Me writing this might even piss off all the normal people in my life, including myself. Because at the end of the day, I am normal, too. I am not going to start sharing about how normal I was or wasn’t, or how normal my friends were or weren’t. But the reality is: a lot happened to me that does not fall into the category of normal.
It wasn’t until long after I married, well into my 30s, that I could even drive through my hometown to get to my mom’s house without feeling sick to my stomach. At 56, I can finally put it all together. Sort of. I am still in process—a lifelong one, I imagine.
I don’t think I understood the gravity of what it means to be normal, aka human, at the age of 15. Or maybe I understood it all too much. Maybe I felt the absolute, crushing weight of it all, all… the… time.
"You're just too sensitive, Marlo."
I was told that by many.
I want to blame Ocean Vuong for reminding me of this, thank you. I saw him talk last week on Thursday at The Wadsworth, and I’ve been trying really hard to finish his book, The Emperor of Gladness. I have to put it down a lot, because I can’t stop crying, not because of any one particular thing in the pages, but because of the painful, relentless reminders of humanity. Normal or not normal, life in the good ol’ state of Connecticut.
I won’t turn this into a confessional. I’ve been known to do that. But there is just too much humanity happening right now.
Ocean, what a beautiful name. His photos and his words opened a door to look back on my "why." Why I was making photographs in the first place. The rawness. The truth I believed they held. The remembrance of being a documentarian at heart. I see things. Beauty in the regularity of people’s lives, mixed in with capturing forever a people “not seen”.
Back then, I pitied people for making pretty things. I preferred edgy... even though I loved my work and saw it as beautiful in its own way. It just wasn’t everyone else’s beauty.
Once, on a cross-country trip, I ended up at Antelope Island in the middle of a salt lake in Utah. There, I captured what I consider a beautiful photo by all the "normal" standards. It was a true achievement for me, pretty was not easy. But it stayed in a box. I kept it only as a keepsake.
That one time I took a beautiful photograph.
Antelope Island, Utah, 1998
Then, right on cue, a friend texts me at 11:00 PM on Sunday.
"I am struggling."
Concerned about their kid entering high school, I ask, "What was your freshman year like for you?"
And just like that, I was jolted back to mine.
I pretty much spent my entire freshman year of high school crying. It was a traumatic year, and I will just leave it at that. It was a sharp and painful moment, a moment where a perceived, beautiful and rightfully mine “thing” was ripped away from me. The normal life that was supposed to be mine.
For a long time, that weight stayed in everything I touched. My art was layered with so much heavy.
But recently, a friend commented on how I am currently one of the only artists she knows who is so genuinely happy with their work. I was telling her about my watercolors, how deeply in love with them I am. The light, the feeling, the quiet joy they give me.
It’s something I don’t recall feeling about my work in the past.
Where I used to protect myself with the hard and the edgy, my workflow now is layered with light, life, and an unapologetic beauty. Maybe I am still "too sensitive." Maybe I am still carrying all that humanity. But at 56, after a long hiatus from art-making, I’m letting the light in and putting it on paper, just not from a dark room.
