Lovely. Lovely addresses outer beauty, not inner truth. Eliza Dolittle in My Fair Lady went from having "loverly" wishes of warm hands and feet to actually becoming lovely — an image molded by Henry Higgins. Being lovely played an important role in my life — I too wanted "warm hands and feet" and believed my physical welfare trumped my emotional well being.
My parents were dismissive of my difficult emotions and this left a void within me. As a youngster, I wrote a poem about being chased by a hostile figure and read it to Mom. She gave a short, exhale, said it sounded strange and went about her business. I felt unimportant and devalued. To componsate, I adopted a lovely persona. It shielded me from conflicts with them and from my own inner turmoil. My brother, on the other hand, took a different path which kept Mom and Dad's hands full. Unlike me, my brother was a risk taker, which kept him in his own lime light. If my parents weren't getting phone calls from school about my brother's misbehaviors, then they were getting a call from the police. The worse his behavior, the better mine appeared.
While Mom and Dad were dealing with my brother, I kept a low profile and immersed myself in the safety of my artwork. My art would later disavow this lovely role. Acceptable behavior would no longer hide my inner truth.
SUMMARY OF PART 1
During my childhood, there were good and bad times. Why the bad dwarfed the good and made a defining impact in shaping my emotional life, I can only guess. Prehaps there were more bad times than good. Prehaps the bad outweighed the good and therefore had more sticking power. I have a melancholy personality and because of this, maybe I tend to gravitate towards the negative. Who knows? But whatever the reason, I buried an important part of my personality so that I wouldn't feel threatened by conflict.
Ill feelings, negative emotions and difficult behavior gestated in the fertile darkness of time.
