(I’m) So Smart (I Got Life Lessons Dripping Out My Butthole)

Inpatient facility. 2012. The assignment was to write a list of ten “core beliefs” – my absolute truths – through which I filter every experience. They were pretty dark. 

• #1: I am ugly.
• #2: I am a problem. 
• #5: I am only tolerated.
• #10: Nothing matters.

But there was one out of the ten that was positive.

• #4: I am smart.

When I was a kid, I thought I was so smart that things would just sorta work out for me no matter what. I ignored all conventional advice. Took nothing seriously. 

As a teenager, I told my dad that I’d been shooting heroin for a year, (I think mostly) just to see how he’d respond. He kinda sighed and said, “Well, at least you’re not smoking crack. I hear that’s the drug that will hook you immediately and destroy your life.” 

So the next day, I smoked crack for the first time, just to prove my dad wrong. Everything everyone believed was wrong. I was smarter than everyone.

When I was first introduced to “expressive art therapy,” my response was something along the lines of: “I’m a suicidal basketcase, I can’t keep a needle out of my arm, and you want me to color? Go fuck yourself.”

But treatment pushes the idea that you’re “powerless over your addiction.” That you can’t solve the problem on your own. Eventually (VERY SLOWLY) I became more receptive to taking advice even when I thought it was stupid and pointless.

Art, it turned out, could keep a needle out of my arm. It went from being a frustrating chore to all I wanted to do. It gave me an outlet to express myself, validation, and (something that at least resembles) self-esteem. And eventually it gave me a path. It gave me tasks and goals – a fucking to-do list to keep me busy and off drugs, while also supporting me financially. It gave me freedom from addiction, from poverty, and from the kinds of jobs I’ve never wanted and could never do.

That kid who thought everything would work out for him on the basis of his SPARKLING WIT and KEEN INSIGHT – he was a fucking idiot. Things have not all worked out for me. I spent years living in hell.

But I don’t anymore. Shit is working out. And as hard and as often as I work, it could be argued that I’m kinda skating through life on personality. Even the work I don’t enjoy, it’s all in service of something I love.

With all the money and praise regularly FED to me by strangers, all the people who look to me for advice or tell me how brilliant some painting, writing, or element of my business model is, it’s easy sometimes to feel like I just might be SO SMART I GOT LIFE LESSONS DRIPPING OUT MY BUTTHOLE.

That said, all of this is built around something I’d initially rejected with total contempt. So it’s maybe not the worst idea for me to remind myself of the remote possibility that – despite my REMARKABLE LIFE EXPERIENCE and the TREMENDOUS WISDOM I regularly bestow – I maybe don’t know everything about everything.

MAYBE.