On Connection

by Kae Tempest

The spirit of the depths is the ancient part of you. The part that responds to the invisible world. The part that makes no sense and speaks in heavy symbols. Your madness, your dreams, your visions. The spirit of the depths communicates through archetypes, masks, animal shapes. It is drawn to nature and wilderness. The spirit of the depths is not satisfied when you obtain the things the spirit of the times told you that you needed in order to live a satisfying life.

‘Love does not happen with words.’ If I’m to commit, I need to commit in action, not just in thought. A daily practice of intentionally connecting to someone else’s story can offer me, the engaged reader, a lived example of how to approach an exchange without being exploitative, violent or selfish.

Next time I’m about to cast a harsh judgement on a stranger who offends me, can I allow myself instead to see them as the flawed and complex human that they are? Full of heartbreak, loss, ambition and disappointment, walking a volatile path of all the things they’ve ever failed at?

The internet makes it possible for like people to find each other, and this is extremely important. But it makes it difficult for unlike people to contact each other without their defences up.

This non-acknowledgement of the full spectrum of a person’s interior life by that person themselves makes it much easier to mute the parts that are inconvenient.

If you allow approval to define you, you will have no choice but to allow disapproval to define you when it comes.

It’s true that if people generally approve of what I’m saying, it is easier to believe that what I’m saying has worth. But when they stop approving, where will that leave me?

I must know myself outside of what I produce, because who I am has got nothing to do with what I am capable of generating, what I fail at or what I achieve.

The creative compass is the instinct that drew you to your discipline in the first place, and when you are in connection with it, it will tell you everything you need to know about how you’re doing with your work.

The person with the great ideas that judges other people’s output as inferior to what they themselves could produce, but has never actually committed themselves to producing anything in full; this is the fallacy of artistic endeavour.

If I’m down, I can’t leave the house to go shopping for food. I can’t get off the sofa to brush my teeth before bed. I can’t go to bed. I can’t get up. I can’t go outside at all in case the neighbours see me. I can’t allow myself to be seen. But I can’t be inside because I’m suffocating or sinking into a hole.

I am also referring to the symbolic stages we walk out on to each day. The stage of our online presence but also the stages we step on to at work or at school or when we link up with mates. Who we allow or expect ourselves to be for others.

Backstage, alone, the performer struggles to find the energy necessary to enquire into the quality of their character; without any of the reassurance that comes from social acceptance or the bliss of cohesion, how do you know how to be?

I could not understand how it was possible that I could pull myself together for a work commitment, but not for my own sanity.

When I need connection the most, it eludes me. I find myself lost, doing stupid things, losing control of my emotions and slowing right down to a dead pace. Nothing but air and silence. Just when I think it’s gone for ever, that’s when it comes back on me. Out of nowhere. As if it never left. I feel myself caught up and taken and fully myself again. It’s like it needs me to have no expectations. It demands a complete change of perspective. I can be lost for days, struggling to even hold the pen because my hands are made of soil, and then finally I’ll give in, start watching a documentary about Manny Pacquiao through half-closed eyelids, and suddenly it explodes into the room and I feel it break across me. Sometimes when it comes on strong like that, after an absence of days or weeks, it makes me cry. I sit and write in tears. I don’t know why. Nothing’s wrong! It’s like I’ve crested a hill that I’ve been climbing for ever, and I finally get to see the valley beyond.

I can’t summon connection down from the ether and expect it to land in my lap. But I can do everything in my power to create a welcoming environment for it when it does decide to show up.

Whole weeks pass so quiet and slow, you don’t know what’s wrong with you and you pretend everything’s normal and you get on with editing the manuscript or practicing in double-time, but in the quietest, lowest parts of your consciousness, you hear the voice saying, It hasn’t come today. I haven’t felt it, and it leaves you spongy. Waiting for a friend who doesn’t call. Going through the motions, chipping away at it.

But any interference will impede it. Trying to make it happen stops it in its tracks.

Taking a full day’s break from my phone helps me rediscover the pace of my own mind, which is useful for feeling in full possession of my senses.

And much music is the product of mass manufacture, cynically assembled. It wants nothing but your clicks. It actively seeks your numbness.

Pay attention to the details when you kiss your lover.

When things go fuzzy, switch focus. But if you can’t switch focus. Don’t switch focus. There’s no must. No have to. Only try to. Choose to.

other people’s opinions do not define you. What defines you? The very moment that you find yourself in. Let go.