the compulsive creative
When does one sit with the anxiety of existence, and when does one return to the fantasy world?
September is always the hottest month of the year, and I can feel the sunlight on the other side of the window panes cooking the inside of the living room. Sweat trickles down my back, and my worn T-shirt begins to stick to my shoulders. I creep up behind Bee, who’s sitting at the cherry wood dining table. I watch as she replays a clip on her laptop. On the screen, a letter transforms into a paper airplane that glides through a cityscape with shades of orange, purple, and pink, eventually making its way to a fictional version of space. Then, a set of hands catches a star in the sky, pulling it back to Earth and releasing it into the wild as a butterfly.
Bee turns around and smiles at me before tilting her head back to the screen. “This part might be ready,” she says. She’s in some computer program I don’t recognize with various buttons on the side to assist her with editing. The clip is a tad fuzzy, and she explains that the quality will increase after rendering, which refers to a process in animation where the raw video is combined with audio elements in a finalized version that can be played on different mediums. Bee takes her hand off the mouse and picks up a stylus, shifting her head towards an iPad that she uses to draw sketches of the original images to upload to her computer. I ask her how many drawings she created to finish the second frame.
“What’s twenty-four times four?” Bee says.
“Ninety-six? Good god.” I shake my head in disbelief.
She shrugs and smiles. Is drawing each iteration of a doodle a similar level of effort to hitting a tennis ball, or writing a sentence in a story? I try to make comparisons in my head that make sense.
Bee tells me there’s serenity within the tediousness.
My eyes travel to the surface of the table. Mismatched pens and paint brushes are strewn around her workspace, likely from a light pink bag of miscellaneous art supplies that is tipped over, its contents half-spilled. It’s hard to tell what components contribute to which mediums, which are used for professionalism and which are reserved for play.
In Bee’s life—through graduate school and side hustles and contract gigs—moments of boredom, sources of joy, and annihilations of stress take similar forms: acts of creation. In Bee’s world, boundaries blur.
Bee and I walk into some Thai restaurant north of LA. It’s in one of those nondescript, strip-mall-like shopping centers, where one could also find a payday loan, buy a new vape, or pick up a mediocre pizza, ready in ten, for the whole family. There’s barely anyone here, and eating dinner at six feels more like lunch these days. My stomach howls.
We sit catty-corner to each other in a half-oval-shaped red booth, and Bee points out that we are always eating dinner together in booths. This booth, though, is different from the other booth we sat in a couple of weekends before: at some place in Los Feliz with our three friends, surrounded by cream-colored pillows with draping tassels, sunk down in the cushions and all wondering, without verbally acknowledging, how we’d shove ten-dollar tacos into our mouths in that type of seating arrangement. That place—with its agave plant shooting into the sky from the center of the bottom floor, where everyone looked important online, and probably less so in real life, donning clothing that appeared straight out of a nineties fashion catalog, where it felt embarrassing to take pictures but hard not to, especially in the low-lit bar with the forest-green velvet couch and the stone-white coffee table, a mirage of a city’s flamboyance—had no comparison to this place, where a kid in a high chair across from us drops grains of rice onto the mopped tile floor, where a woman in unremarkable blue jeans carts around bowls of red curry on a dolly, where no one cares.
How much do I care? I live on the outskirts of Bee’s world, just as I live on the outskirts of LA. I’m dipping my toes in, but maybe I’m also emerging. If someone asked me if I love LA or hate LA, which you can never seem to assume it is not one or the other, I don’t know what I would say. I like it in the way that I like going to movies by myself. I like falling into somewhere else, knowing that once the adventure comes to an end, I will leave. It’s why movies end swiftly, with one last hurrah in the final ten minutes, and quickly push you out. Not dissimilar to how I hop back in my car and make my way down the five while the euphoria from some random fall weekend is still humming, playing Chappell Roan on repeat, the credits rolling of my temporary life.
You just can’t let the magic linger too long.
Bee and I methodically scan the menus in front of us, and over the next hour, conversation follows the pattern of digging into the earth—it starts with plucking grass (“What stands out on the menu?” and “Do you like spicy food?”) and leads to finding some mystifying object with a shovel three feet below (“Why do we create?”).
As for the latter: We’ve had these conversations before, and we’ll have them for the rest of our lives; each time, we can only hope to near the center. “It’s this one memory I have from childhood,” Bee says. At eleven, she quietly watched her brother in the midst of chaos. At that age, you can’t unsee things like that. You can’t understand at the time what to do.
Her brother Ty was diagnosed with Autism and OCD at an early age. Bee’s parents separated when she was young. Her father was largely absent, suffering from a mental condition that made it difficult to form healthy relationships. Her mother immigrated from South America and cleaned houses; later, she began working for a shipping company. Bee and Ty lived with her in a small apartment, the kind of space where nothing goes unheard.
In her home environment, Bee was always in motion. On any given week, she’d hear clashes of objects hit the floor from another room, fill out complex and tedious paperwork to send to an IDD agency, and listen patiently, with a tricky mix of empathy and unease, as Ty would share something he’d been mulling over for hours. Her mother was typically gone for at least twelve hours a day, working long hours into the evening. Someone had to do it.
“There’s a certain level of emotional dissociation in all of these,” Bee says, describing how one must become a few degrees removed from the issue at hand. You can’t take it personally if your items are misplaced, you can’t guarantee that the agency will provide any benefits, and you can’t provide reassurance in every conversation that will prolong symptoms of the other person’s illness.
“I’ve often acted as a witness, a caregiver, and a mediator for my brother,” she says, sharing that these roles were thrust upon her before she had time to make sense of what was happening and what her brother’s future entailed.
From an early age, Bee remembers that she always had pens and paper around her. Her grandfather recognized her creative capabilities when she was young and frequently gifted her art supplies. She spent most of her free time drawing and coloring in states of solitude, taking time for herself when she could. Though it was difficult to acknowledge or admit, her brother’s health condition was precarious, and over time it became clear that obtaining resources would be a constant battle of finding a few coins in the sand. Following the growing uncertainty at home, Bee’s art-making began to accelerate.
“I created a lot of fantasy stories filled with characters with long, flowing hair and mind-bending, earth-shattering narratives,” Bee says. “It was almost as if the more surreal the narratives were, the more comfortable I felt in my own sense of being.”
In Bee’s fantasy worlds, the plot unfolded as she created it to be. There was a larger purpose to every heartbreak between two characters, a fulfillment in every conquest, a burst of gratitude in every tribulation. Characters were rewarded for heroic behavior, enemies were served with satisfying karmic defeats, and there was beauty in the strange and unfamiliar. The real world, though, made no sense. It was cruel, preying on her brother’s vulnerabilities without evidence of which hill to climb or when stretches of pain would end. Mostly, it was passive, in a sort of haunting and helpless way. The other worlds contained endless possibilities, but here, reality only seemed to reveal muted chances.
Because nothing made sense, creation continued. “I remember I would be at school and my papers would be filled with drawings. There wouldn’t be a single blank space on a page,” Bee says. She tells me that she hated speaking in class and had a growing sense of social anxiety when interacting with others. “I didn’t really want to engage with anyone at school. I just wanted to go home and work on my stories.”
At age twelve, Bee was struck by the artist’s flip: when creation becomes an antidote to reality.
Let me explain.
Art is often practiced as an individual activity, typically spawning from a sense of childlike wonder. It is an act particularly welcoming of obsession and awe. It’s an act of discovery for those who ache to discover the most. There are many conflicting emotions to this. Moments of joy and despair dance together, interchangeable. Feelings are intertwined as opposing elements, like fire and ice. One could start a piece of art with curiosity, only to end up in a state of turmoil. Ignorance dances on the fine line of bliss.
Then, art becomes a need to explain. A justification of one’s state of being, kind of like a silent cry to the sky. I must make it make sense; I must tell you who I am, without telling you who I am—the artist toils with these thoughts, creating a line of vague communication to the outside. At times, art is an apology: World, I am sorry that I don’t fit you, and that I must create my own homes inside my head. Our creative endeavors latch on to our inadequacies, our loneliness. Art is a chase to some other place where loneliness doesn’t exist.
“As I observed my family growing up, I developed a profound sense of powerlessness and uncertainty. My stories were something that were just mine. Creating was a way to feel at home in my own personhood,” Bee tells me. “But when you spend most of your life not feeling at home in your body or connected to your environment in a spiritual sense, you’ll do anything to get that feeling.” She describes the process of trying to do anything else [besides making art] in moments of stress and conflict as “nearly impossible.”
It’s confusing to associate art with addiction because two things exist at once: escapism and enjoyment. The stereotypes around artists and addiction are rarely tied to the art itself but what drives the individual to create in the first place, or makes them a “tortured artist,” typically in the context of substance abuse or some form of trauma. Maybe art is a compulsion, but it isn’t always unwanted or against one’s conscious wishes. Sometimes it’s purposeful and present, leading one to a deeper understanding of the reality of the world, and sometimes it’s avoidant and dissociative, running towards what may never exist, and trying to come up with answers to questions that will always remain unclear. Sometimes, in a twisted warp of reality, it’s both.
When does one sit with the anxiety of existence, and when does one return to the fantasy world?
What can seem immaterial or random, matters.
For example, the use of a moving picture versus a still image, or kinetic typography instead of static text.
Bee’s creating a promotional video based on interviews with callers who shared their experiences using the SAMHSA hotline. One of the reviews is from a teenager who dialed 988 and expressed that they were thinking about taking their life; the call through the hotline calmed them down and gave them time to re-evaluate their decision. Callers to the hotline may not have other resources or access to mental healthcare in their personal lives, and Bee’s video aims to communicate the positive effect of having an empathetic listener who can soothe the caller during heightened periods of emotions. Conversations with listeners on the hotline aim to help expand perspective.
Presentation matters. There’s a strategic approach to everything: the images used (if they are symbolic and meaningful to people), the colors in the images (if they are bright enough to be catchy but not so bright that they aren’t warm). To produce the final video, Bee breaks down the interview scripts into scenes then draws illustrations for each. The visuals are then approved by the client, and Bee moves into the animation process, where she engages the client in an iterative process to add motion to the illustrations. Accessibility matters, and she’s instructed to create characters that are both gender and racially ambiguous.
“In our technology age, where we’re digesting so much visual information, people crave something that will grab their attention longer than a still image,” Bee says. “We crave something visually exciting, even if it’s an advertisement about tragedy.” She tells me that targeting youth populations was at the forefront of the creative process, as the suicide rate among teenagers continues to rise.
A series of sketches eventually turns into a story. “Storytelling is a way to make the complex more beautiful,” Bee says. “It’s the only thing that I feel is in my power to make others feel something. Art is the strongest language you can learn to speak.” Maybe it is the difference between what makes art a durable creation instead of a temporary compulsion. Stories have longevity, a sense of continuity across periods of time.
I want to ask Bee if she would still be an artist if her upbringing was different. I want to ask if hardship makes art better or worse. It has to make it better, I hypothesize, because practice leads to improvement, and her pain drove frantic acts of repetition. Then, I think about the time that went to waste earlier in my life, when pain was deeper, when my mind was louder. I think about my art now, the way it is still and holistic and full. Memories simply pass through my mind in waves of cuts that are no longer deep, and I’ll never know how each one shows up on a page.
I want to ask Bee what this is all for, but instead, I sit beside her, pick up a set of markers, and begin to draw.
I like the premise of your work here, and you do it well.