“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”
May Sarton

By choice, by chance, or by circumstance I seem always to be either frightening or frightened, and surely strange. And I have always been hidden from the world even if I were standing right in front of someone. I learned very early on that the only way to stay safe was to hide.

I hid as a very small girl curled into a hillock behind a large stand of overgrown forsythia bushes and wrote like mad, my heart crying out on the page for help that never came. An abused child never feels like the abuse will end. And then when having to interract with others I was never able to quite fit in, I was unmeasurably uncomfortable and frightened, as though I were wearing a disquise to hide who I really was and only once home again when I could take off the “person suit” the world saw could I really be myself. Only alone in my room with my dog and a book did I ever feel safe. More than 60 years later this is still exactly how I live. And only now have I come to accept that this is okay.

The internet has done this for me really. I have found wonderful friends on the internet that I can communicate with but I am still behind the veil, protected, and I can turn the computer off and retreat once more with my little dog and a book. The difference now is that the net has given me a way to put some part of me out into the world, my writing, my art, and allow me to be “seen” without having to leave my house. And now, unlike when I was a child, when I know I am safe here, still I am agoraphobic and now, at 68, disabled to the point that getting around my house, or even up out of a chair is a challenge, nearly 70 years in this world I am still hiding. But something is beginning to change, ever so slightly, and though shy and afraid I hope this might be so.

I started working at my art ten years ago. I was self-taught and didn’t have even a hope of being a great artist, but it became a way for me to express myself in a visual sense when I was so deep in the depths of despair words — after writing for a lifetime — were harder and harder to come by. The above painting is not “me” and yet she is more me than a photograph. I began to know myself in a new way, and I kept on with my art even though it would never be hung in a museum because it became a way for me to “show” who I was without having to be seen. My “100 Ladies Project” were all aspects of me, everything I have ever drawn has been. It wasn’t until I finished the above painting last night that I looked at what I had painted almost in disbelief. I felt like I was looking into a mirror. This is who I really am, hiding, peeking out, longing to be part of the world “out there” but having finally accepted that though that is not ever going to be me in this lifetime, if I could share my writing and art I could exist in the world in a way that was possible for me, and somehow, after all these years, I felt like I had found my place in the world.

People have been interested in buying some of my work but I don’t begin to know how. I don’t know how to properly package art for mailing, and I can’t get out to mail it, but there are ways now that you can do this from home. I am only now gaining the confidence to try. I can be here at my little cottage in the woods with my animal companions but I can send part of me out into the world as a representative of me, a real part of me. I was rather startled at the thought, and then, it just seemed right.

I am still hiding, but I am inching forward, from behind the veil, ready to reach out to the world and send these pieces of me if anyone would like to have them. I will find a way, I will have to find a way, but I will still be hiding.