Some voices eventually settle inside us, until we begin to believe that they are telling the truth.
Guilt does not always come from what we have done. It can also grow out of words repeated for years, until they become an inner voice.
After hearing the same words again and again, I eventually began to believe they were true.
One question kept returning. What was wrong with me?
Why did my way of understanding the world so often seem inadequate?
Why were my reactions so often rejected?
Why did I always have to be corrected?
Then the words became a voice.
Hateful, selfish, unbearable, out of touch, thoughtless, stupid, cold, arrogant, superficial, heartless.
Those words spoke about my way of being in the world. About my reactions, about what I understood or failed to understand, about what I should have felt, accepted, or become. Repeated often enough, they no longer came only from other people. They had entered the way I perceived myself.
I thought through words — through their words.
And yet, there was one place where their words had never taken hold in the same way.
I drew.
I had been drawing before I even knew how to speak. I had not chosen it. Drawing was neither a refuge I had built against them nor a way of resisting them. It existed before all of that.
When I drew, no one could tell me what I was seeing.
People could look at my drawings, like them, reject them, comment on them. Later, other artists, other works, and other ways of making art fed into my practice. Those influences may have transformed my work, but they never occupied the place from which I looked.
That difference is what interests me.
In my life, another person’s words could come before my own judgement. Someone could tell me who I was, what I should have understood, or how I should have reacted. Over time, I could end up searching within myself for proof of what had been said about me.
In drawing, the order was different.
I looked first.
Something caught my attention. A shape, a relationship, a colour, a distance. My hand moved from there. I did not need to know why this thing rather than another imposed itself upon my gaze. I did not need to justify it before it could become a gesture.
Drawing thus developed into a language whose words I did not need to know.
That language did not remain unchanged. It changed with me, with what I saw, learned, and practised. But its starting point has remained the same: something appears within my field of perception, my attention settles on it, and the gesture begins.
No one can make that passage for me.
What I question today, therefore, is not whether drawing protected me from other people’s words. I do not believe I ever used it that way.
What interests me is that a language could develop inside me without first needing to be named.
While I could doubt my way of being, I never doubted the need to look.
While I could search through other people’s words for a definition of myself, I needed no one else to recognise what held my attention.
I judged my life according to their standards.
I have never drawn according to their standards.
