I Am Bitter

This is the first time I have submitted a piece to Judith Heartsong's Artsy Essay Contest.  This is the contest for October.  The subject of the contest is "The One Thing I Would Most Like You to Know About Me."

The One Thing I Would Most Like You to Know About Me

I want you to know that I am bitter.

Does this seem like a negative thing to admit? 

It's an observation that's related to a painting I recently became acquainted with, "The Vinegar Tasters."

In "The Vinegar Tasters,"  three men stand around a vat of vinegar.  Each man has just tasted the vinegar and is having a reaction to it. 

Vinegar, by the way, comes from a French word, vinaigre, meaning sour wine and has been used since ancient times.  The Chinese saw great medicinal qualities in vinegar and called it the essence of life. 

One man in the painting looks sour.  He represents Confucius, who looked to tradition for meaning and order.   Another man looks bitter.  He represents Buddha.  He represents me:  I am bitter.

To Buddha, life is bitter.  Life is full of  attachments and desires that lead to suffering.  Life is a revolving wheel of pain, which can be escaped by achieving Nirvana.

This sounds awful, I know.  We all want to be happy.  But bear with me, now.

For a long time, I tried to avoid my feelings of suffering.  So I buried myself in intellectual pursuits.  I set a series goals for myself, most of which I achieved.  These are some of the goals I set for myself:  I will get this degree, I will get this award, I will get into this program, I will get this grade, I will be inducted into this society, I will be the best in the class, I will win this contest.   (Not this artsy essay contest, mind you.  I'm speaking of the past!)

Many of my pursuits were in the arts.   I studied studio art and creative writing.  But I'm pretty sure that neither my art nor my writing really spoke to people.  It certainly didn't speak to me.  I was a scholarship girl. 

A scholarship girl is a student who works hard and does all the "right" things, but doesn't know why she is doing them.  She takes good notes, writes good papers, learns techniques, and even creates mildly exceptional works of art.  And her teachers love her.  She loves them, too.  She lives for their applause.

I use "girl" instead of woman because in so many ways I wasn't fully grown.

The whole time, I was pretending I wasn't suffering.  I was suffering, but I had pushed down my hurt.  The details of my hurt aren't important.  The hurt and the reasons for it are common enough, universal.  All of us have hurt in the ways I was hurting.  In a nutshell, I hurt because I had never learned to deal with loss or longing or grief.  I hurt because I didn't know who I was.  Tobias Wolff described my condition in his memoir, This Boy's Life.  He said, "Because I did not know who I was, any image of myself, no matter how grotesque, had power over me."  Images of yourself aren't necessarily grotesque as in "ugly."  A beautiful image of yourself, such as a scholarship girl, can feel grotesque if it doesn't feel true.

 Inside, I was bitter, like Buddha is bitter in the picture.  Outwardly, I smiled a lot.

The one thing I would most like you to know about me is that I was bitter then.  And I want you to know that I'm bitter now.  I'm no longer a scholarship girl (Although there are still many ways in which I'm not fully grown.) 

The difference between the person I was then and the person I am now is that I'm learning to embrace my suffering, as one embraces a child.  I'm not running away from my suffering by trying to find happiness in outside  accomplishments or pursuits.  I'm learning to cherish my suffering as one cherishes a child.  Because out of my suffering comes my art. 

The thing I want you to know about me is that I don't believe that this kind of bitterness is a bad thing.   The Chinese character for suffering is "bitter," and Buddha said suffering is holy.   It is holy because points us toward liberation.  I think the Christ story teaches us the same thing.  When Thomas touched Christ's wounds, Thomas looked deeply into those wounds, the wounds representing all suffering.  Indeed, to look at any wound takes courage.  

Now, when I write.  I look deeply into my suffering, and it is sometimes a terrible place to go, but there's a liberation that happens afterwards.  With that liberation comes a new energy.  That energy feels a lot like joy.

I want you to know:  I am bitter and that is okay.

A few years ago, I ran across a poem by Stephen Crane:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter-bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

I remember my own heart beating fast as I read this poem.  The hairs went up on the back of neck and on my arms.  Something about the poem felt very true.  But for a long time I couldn't get past the negative connotations of "bestial" and "bitter." 

Now, I see that the creature is bestial in the way we all are.  We are animals, after all, beasts.  We live according to the same natural laws as beasts.  We have to kill to eat, and we have to eat to live.  We are mad to couple, mad to survive.  

The beast is bitter in the same way that I am bitter, I realize now.   The beast is eating its bitter heart because that's where its suffering lives.   

When I write, I'm a lot like the creature in Crane's poem, I think.  When I write, I am naked and bestial.  I am eating my bitter, bitter heart.

Which brings me to my final point:

Who is the third man in the painting of the "Vinegar Tasters"? 

He is Lao-Tse.  He is smiling.  He has learned that life, even as painful as it sometimes is, is sweet.

Do I want someday to be the smiling one?

You bet.

I don't know what it will mean for my writing.  But, yes, I want to be like him, like Lao-Tse. 

I want you to know that I'm working on it.