My Mandate

Cartoonist Nina Paley (with the help of Chris Carlson, Theodore Gray,
and the "Behemoth") created a quilt based on the circa 1878
"Horse in Motion" photographs by Edweard Muybridge.

I am living a new life. You can that I have changed in the clothes I wear, you can see it in my apartment and you may notice the change when I talk. What’s different? How I think about myself.

I value the development of successful relationships as life’s greatest accomplishment. So I have felt like a failure my whole life because I am neither a parent nor a partner and I don’t work well in close proximity with people. This negative view of myself has been counterbalanced by the pride I have taken in various achievements.

That pride seems entirely unwarranted to me now. But it got me through life. You have to be able to get up every morning with enough pride to go on so I have no shame or regrets about being so wrong. What seems so wrong to me now was the source of my pride.

It’s making the costumes that changed everything.

All my experiences with pride until this year came from the approval of others and their approval was of things about which I felt ambivalent. The screenplay becomes a source of pride when it is sold.

With the costumes I need no one. I can sit in front of them or look at pictures of them and I feel a pride that is both self-generated and far, far more satisfying than pride triggered by the approval of others.

I am grateful for the pride I took in my achievements. I was able to live a life of integrity in spite of failing at what I deemed to be life’s greatest accomplishment: A long-lasting intimate relationship. But those accomplishments were in the wrong voice. They came from my head voice, my brain, whereas the sense of pride I feel as an artist has changed how I dress, how I live and how I talk because it is the voice of my soul.

I have found my voice: I am a maker of entertainments.