The Tanya Artscape

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Episode 4: Reinvention

Reinvention.

 

I seldom look or feel like the last time you saw me. I am constantly changing and growing and exploring new ways of self-expression. It’s an energy I can’t deny, an impulse I can’t shake. This energy is expansive, powerful, and constant, always looking for new ways of existing.

Before I could tame this energy, it expressed itself through discordance, restlessness, anxiety and many other forms of disharmony. Before I learnt how it worked and what this energy needed from me, it would try to destroy me. It was like a burst pipe, everything spewing in different directions and causing havoc, breaking things with sheer force. But now, it is like a tap that I can open and close when it asks to be let out. Now, I can let out the water at differing pressures and when it is most convenient for me - just as long as I do not ignore it and let it out before it consumes me. This water that I am always letting out, this creative energy that is always waiting to manifest in my physical world, is the source of my changeability. It shapes my environment and my body, and my thoughts. This energy is forever seeking to express itself in new ways in our physical world, and through my art and creativity, I can appease it by giving it life in our physical world.

We are all like this. All of us are vessels for this energy. However, I am intentional about working with it, and I often change drastically and radically due to being deliberate in letting this energy guide me. 

I don’t consciously seek to reinvent myself; I get called to it by this energy. It whispers and gnaws at me, saying, “How else can I exist in your reality? How else can I see myself anew? I want to see what else I can be through your mind and body. Glorify me through your creativity! Let’s see what lifeform we can form together.”

There are several benefits to going with its flow. It is natural, creative, and life-giving. It fills me with energy that repairs and sustains me. It fills life with awe, excitement, and joy as I, too, derive verve and excitement from the things I create. With every new form of expression, the energy and I rejoice because new life is birthed, expanding this energy’s reality and perspective, as well as my own. With every brainchild born, I receive new insight and a new understanding of who I AM. I find new ways to appreciate the beauty of life and new ways to solve life’s conundrums. It is a beautiful dance of give and take that grounds me and makes me whole.

Through this energy, I exist in that delicate balance between life and death because with every creation, an old idea of who I am dies, and a new one is born. This state is who we all are; however, many do not see it as blatantly as I do, and most actually go against this energy and prefer to repeat what they have always done.

People always claim it is too late to reinvent themselves, but how can it be too late to be what you naturally are, a reinvention machine? Our only constant is change in this reality. Our only certainty in this reality is that nothing ever remains the same. Therefore, to change and reinvent ourselves is more who we are than trying to be what we were at another time. Change is life.