Making Sure I’m Okay

“When I’m asked what I hope people get out of my work, I always feel that it’s kind of a backwards question. I never really know what to say, because the real question should be, ‘What do I hope to get out of my work?’ and the answer is that I just want to check with everybody else to make sure I’m still okay.”

This from Jon Klassen in his Caldecott Medal acceptance speech for This is Not My Hat.

Every time I hear an artist in a field different from mine make a statement about his or her creative process that mirrors my experience as a writer, I am thrilled. I’m not sure why, exactly. Perhaps it makes me feel less odd. I’ve come to know that other writers are as odd as I am, but when the field includes visual artist and musicians and creators of all kinds . . . well, then, maybe we’re all just human!

And maybe creation, any kind of creation—sand castles, a nice meal, sonatas, sculptures—comes from the same place, a place of such deep longing for acceptance that it can be shared only through the creations themselves.

Being human is such a glorious and tenuous proposition. We come into the world needing—needing food, warmth, security . . . love. Needing our mothers. Needing our families. Needing a community to give us a place. And most of us get all that with certain imperfections imbedded in the delivery, and yet we still enter the world as adults with the same question, “Am I okay? Am I really, really okay?”

Does that uncertainty exist because our culture fails so badly at giving nurture? Or is it that our needs—ours and our parents’, too—are so complex that some degree of failure is inevitable? Was the artist who drew a record of his successful hunt on the walls of his cave asking the same question? “See what I did? Does that mean I’m okay?” Or does our profound insecurity about our place in the world come with what we call civilization?

As a product of a Judea/Christian culture I have been inclined to blame our religious strictures for our neuroses, but when Buddha spoke of “suffering,” he wasn’t referring simply to the inevitability of physical deterioration and death. He was talking about what we do with the inevitable, the way we turn it against ourselves, the second arrow as it is called. That is suffering.

Maybe our uncertainty about ourselves, our perpetual need to have others affirm our worth is simply the product of our ability to think. “I think, therefore I am” might be better framed as “I think, therefore I’m insecure.”

And perhaps the origin of our angst is beside the point. The issue is what do we do with what we have been given . . . the gift of life and the pain of it.

If we are writers, we make stories. If we are visual artists we draw pictures. If we are mothers we love our babies . . . and clean them up again and again and again. If we are bakers we make bread. Engineers build bridges. Gardeners bring life from the soil. Teachers mold lives. All of us, every one of us, creates, because it is in creating that we know we are alive.

Here, dear world, this is what I have to offer!

Now tell me . . . am I okay?