Young and the Restless (8"x10")

“YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS”

I remember the first time I fell in love I was just entering my teens. I’ve been told, as I’m sure many have, that it wasn’t love. A young boy’s emotions in the flight of new experienced feelings with an injection of hormones. Yet even now looking back, I knew that was my first great love. At the time my intuition was just developing, I could not know what I was seeing and thus the awareness of love. It eluded me, the depths of it, its vast capacity of emotion, a boundless sea from elation to hidden devastation. To float in an open and vulnerable position of arms and legs, body exposed upward to the warmth of light, buoyant from the endorphins of love circulating through. To feel so full yet light as a feather is an unbelievable feeling. And yet, just as one surrenders into the euphoria of love, eyes fading into the trust of feelings, sinking into the unknown and naively unmeasured depth. The weather changes and suddenly the trust in a thing we thought we understood, we thought we could navigate, could control becomes foreign. Having us desperately reaching out, struggling to swim, broken with no guidance on how to heal and rebuild. I remember my first love and how beautiful and devastating it was. Nothing can prepare you for such a thing. The magnetism we once yearned for now drowning us in unescapable thoughts. This, I found to be the cost of the first love, to only know a thing when it's gone.

 So, when I created this piece I used the colors of a child, the naivety of youth and the random mess of emotions strewn across the canvas, and yet somehow still able to form a heart in the controlled chaos. I approached the work as the approach of a young heart to love for the first time. The words and crayon like drawings placed across the piece alike our inner child acting out and exploring its emotions. The title “Young and Restless” is not only about the feeling we get the first time we fall in love but every time. No matter how old and mature we get, the feelings and its depth are the same. The title plays a nod to my youth growing up watching the old soap opera “Young and the Restless”, as my mother had it playing every time I came home from school. A reflection of adults everyday enacting dramatic emotions from one end of the spectrum to the other, like children expressing emotions to their fullest, testing the depths without a care.

 My first love was a whirlwind, yet somehow, I found my grounding and the journey began again. Now, more aware of the depth that lies before me in the vast sea of love and how quickly the tides can change. I find myself as we all do, more prepared, cautious with floating open and vulnerable. We train ourselves survival swimming for when euphoric floating fails. We find trust and security in ourselves as though we have control unlike the first time. Even though we find comfort in this idea, having learned all the lessons of the first and prepared in every physical, mental, and emotional way for the second love. The infinite depths of love can never be fully understood, and every love is unique in identity and thus anew to one’s experience. No preparation is ever enough. And although I would never change a thing about these experiences, I find it fascinating that no matter how many times we fall in love, thinking we can have a better control over ourselves, it’s completely the opposite. No age, time, or experience makes it easier. We still do things we would never do, express irrational emotions like a child acting out at our most primal and naive self as if it was the first time. Flailing about with every feeling stretching the spectrum. I find the idea of having no control is the hardest lesson, to embrace the unknown in all its capacity, whatever may come as it will never be the same and never fully understood, yet only to be experienced time and time again. How fortunate to have something so deep and so vast that it will never get boring, never be conquered, or controlled.