Taken at the Beyond Van Gogh Exhibit at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, CA 7.28.21.

I’m losing weight. In any other circumstance I would consider this to be a good thing, but I am losing weight because I am only eating one meal a day. My appetite has somehow disappeared. I’ve been trying to eat a little more throughout the day but it’s hard when you don’t feel hungry. At least I’m saving money.

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The feeling of being lost is something I’m not accustomed to. The last time I was this confused was the first year after graduating college, when I was stuck at a call center job I despised and felt trapped. While I’m currently unemployed, not bound by a desk or boss, I still feel trapped in a feeling I can’t shake. My confidence took a nose dive a few weeks ago when I accepted a job that I had a bad feeling about from the beginning and ended up being a terrible, toxic work environment that forced me to quit on the third day. It made me question my instincts and my judgment. What happened to me? Did the pandemic have a greater effect on me than I anticipated? Or have I hit a crossroads where I have to accept the fact that no matter what job I take I will be miserable by the weight of Capitalism? Must I succumb to office culture, constantly having to put on a fake smile to adhere to politics that otherwise make my stomach turn? All for what— to have a comfortable enough living where I don’t feel like I’m always under water? Chained to a cubicle with no escape, cut off from the rest of the world? Is this living or is it just the start of the Collapse?

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A week after I quit my three day stint at an otherwise hellish company, I visited the Beyond Van Gogh exhibit that has been making its way around the country for the past few months. In a COVID world, it provides a semblance of an escape. Instead of being confined to your home, you can feel like you’re in one of Van Gogh’s pastoral scenes. Maybe you can’t feel the thick, Impressionistic brush strokes but you can pretend for one hour a virus ravaging the world doesn’t exist and the only thing between you and a wheat field is four walls and a projector.

Van Gogh has always been one of my favorite artists. I’ve always felt something about his paintings and up until a week ago I had no idea what it was I felt. Reading the excerpts from Van Gogh’s letters to his brother, Theo, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Van Gogh himself was perpetually lost: All he wanted was to feel connected to the world and every attempt he made to make those connections wound up being a dead end. He wanted to be an art dealer, but he wasn’t any good at it. He tried to be a pastor, but that didn’t pan out, either. Surely painting was the key, however Van Gogh committed suicide before he ever saw the impact his art made on the world. Little would he know that in the year 2021, thousands of people would flock to an exhibition that would project his paintings on a white wall and sell crocheted dolls bearing his resemblance for $60 a pop. He died thinking he was a penniless, talentless loser with no sense of direction.

I feel like I’m always trying to make a connection, whether it is to an audience or to friends and loved ones, and each time I feel like that connection is lost or otherwise not reciprocated. Over the years, I’ve realized it’s me cutting myself off from the world, not the world cutting me off. It’s hard to feel connected to someone who would prefer you at arm’s length. Maybe I’m not a reachable person, but I wonder if people notice the small attempts I try to open myself up. Rome wasn’t built in a day and fill in the blank with every other cliche about things happening in their own time. I’m a tough nut to crack, I know. Awareness is the first step, change is the second but the second step usually takes longer than the first step. I think there is a part of me that relishes in being unreachable because it just makes it that much more difficult to hurt me.

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Despite Van Gogh’s long battle with mental illness, his paintings always evoked something so beautiful in the darkness. His use of vibrant colors mixed with thick brush strokes gave an air of optimism from a man who otherwise went through manic episodes and deep depressions. Starry Starry Night was how he saw the outside world from his window in the asylum he was at after having a depressive episode. His paintings of open fields was him connecting the dots between man and nature, while seemingly providing some sense of elation and comfort from an otherwise confining and cruel world. Even in the darkness, Van Gogh was able to find the vibrancy and liveliness in the world.

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Taken at the Beyond Van Gogh Exhibition at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, CA 7.28.21.

The exhibit was something I needed. I cried a couple of times—from reading the excerpts from his letters to looking at his paintings of Almond Blossoms. In that moment, I felt a kinship to a dead man who never seemed to find his way. It wasn’t the realization I would forever feel lost that made me feel so intensely, but the comfort in knowing that I made a connection to another human being.

Scrawlings

Deep In The Wheat Fields