DAY FIFTY TWO

"I wear my heart on my sleeve, I'm not afraid/To say what I mean, mean what I say/ Set myself up, let myself down/I may be a fool to spread it around..."
 
Some of you may be inexplicably unaware of Gallagher and Lyle's 1976 paen to self-flagellating honesty in matters of the heart and conscience, but you have just read the first verse. 

I woke up with the song on my mind for no reason I could name, and it's been burrowing away in the best earworm tradition all day. Might as well try to make use of it here in the hope that I can somehow exorcise the demon.

In all seriousness wearing one's heart on one's sleeve does have a fairly sincere connecton with creativity, making, and so forth. Even if your making activities are purely for your own interest and pleasure you will be putting something of yourself into them, you will be making some sort of artefact which will evidence something about you and which should it be shared publicly, by accident or design, will reveal a little bit of you. It will tell other's something which once told, cannot be controlled or taken back; it is a public statement.

Now I'm quite prepared to assert that for a great many people this is no big deal whatsoever. What does it matter, they would say, someone else's reaction to your watercolour or hand-knitted socks? For people like me on the other hand, revealing anything about yourself which cannot then be controlled, which runs off into the wild like a Jack Rabbit making it's own haphazard paths, used to be a very big deal indeed. I put that in the past tense because things have improved, not least my mental health, and so people taking away their own interpretations about anything to do with me is not the mind-meltingly anxiety inducing event it once was. I still get echoes of it all the same - I am not blithely self-revealing except in the anonymity of this, as yet, unread blog.
 
For those of my persuasion in the anxiety parade, though perhaps not because of that persuasion, there is a tendency to approach every statement, every act, every piece of work as ironic. One adopts a pose of ironic self-detachment. One never 'owns' anything, and plausible deniability is one's ever present friend. This is in addition to the diffidence and self-deprecation which was once the Englishman's birthright and natural plumage.* 
 
The second verse of the song goes on to talk about not counting the cost, and recognising that one can get burned and hurt by adopting the 'heart on the sleeve' advice. On balance, if you are to be maker of any sort it is far better to accept that possibility than to forevever be on guard against it.
 
Onwards...welcomingly.
 
 
*This seems to have changed somewhat I think for the better of all concerned, though sometimes I wonder.

Picture credit: Anxiety. Bhargov Buragohain, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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