You might wonder why I picked this title for my latest drawing. It might sound too abstract, too gloomy, too depressing. I thought of life as being a container because I feel like many people live a life of quiet desperation as Joe Rogan once said.
I represented this in my drawing by putting the neck in a box and showing how the lively, lush part of us –DREAMS- slowly bleed to the other side of fear. We all have had moments in life when someone or maybe more people disconsidered us and our dreams.
Have you’ve been told that what you dream is absurd, that no one will care about what you want to do differently, that you do not matter , that everyone HAS to struggle, that you are no different?
Has it happened to you to open up and tell your dreams to the wrong people, making you feel like you will never succeed because everyone mocked your idea? This constant bickering is represented by the red blood coming our of the ear. We are deeply hurt inside when no one believes in us, when we are mocked because we are different, because we dream of more from this life which seems grey and dull for far too long.
The entire net of dreams that we store inside our mind is never lost. It’s just buried, sitting in the background, like an entire web of neurons which once sparkled when wiring together. Slowly, after someone is constantly put down, they have two options: to conform or to rebel. As Earl Nightingale has said , “the opposite of courage is conformity”.
Many lose their faith and their courage. The pile up their rage inside and use it against other people just to forget about their own suffering, despair, poverty, conformity and loss. We lose something from ourselves when we conform to a life of desperation . Some might even believe that this is the normality: to have a job which mentally or physicaly drains you, to have struggles constantly, to not be able to just relax and think of ways to make your life easier, to work less and enjoy life more.
People who dare to think of freedom as something normal are being put down and classified as nonsense dreamers, slackers, rebels, losers or just plain lunatics. We lives times in history when people got murdered for daring to think and act differently.
We are no different now, only that the kill happens on the inside of that person, a thing far more dangerous and sad than literal death. Because when someone stores so much frustration and sadness inside they end up being awful for themselves and for others around them. They can become quiet and sad, they can become a zombie at work and at home, they can become depressed, they can become angry, they can become mad.
The price humans pay for living a life in a mental container is huge. I wonder if it is a price worth paying for because feeling dead while you are still alive looks like a no way to live at all…..
