One of my favorite songs (and movies)

We ha our first school killing in Sweden today – a man dressed as Darth Vader killing and stabbing children and teachers with a sword. I don’t recognize Sweden anymore. I don’t feel safe here and it’s not the country I grew up in. I have a bad feeling in my gut. Something is lost – something new is growing like dark weeds in the silence. The politically correctness is like intellectual bondage – we are not allowed to talk about the real and raw nature of things. To stay naive and politically correct can lead to a national suicide when it comes to feeling safe and free because there are no questions asked, no alternative paths to walk. There’s only the blindness of the politically correctness or the extreme opposite where there’s no empathy and knowledge, only bigotry and hate. I don’t know what is happening to my country – or perhaps it’s something happening to the entire world, but I’m starting to feel really, really worried…

I am floating with my consciousness, through different layers of myself. Some layers are soft, others hard and almost impenetrable. There are very delicate  layers, like silk paper – so easy to break with my careless thoughts.

I am a miniature skyscraper made of many levels, so many rooms, elevators going up, or down – and with different views depending where I decide to look outside. On the lower floors, the view makes me feel grounded. I see life outside myself, passing by or being part of me, I don’t know. On the top floor, the view is cloudy, and I always end up feeling dizzy from vertigo.

While standing there, with my vertigo and all – I notice the smallest details hidden in the abstractions of my mind. It makes me feel even more light-headed. And I can see how those details color my perception of myself, life and everything around me. It isn’t the larger picture, the big ideas of things – the whole, that is almighty in our minds. It’s the little stain, the annoying little details – the tiny, dirty spots that makes everything look different and ruined. Emotional pain isn’t a constant texture or form – it only exists inside these small smudges of dirt or old blood stains. These details rule our inner lives.

The view from the top floor is nothing but a white sky. It’s too cloudy for me to be able to see beyond the whiteness. But there is a black stain somewhere in the white. I look closer. Now I can see that it is the smallest Universe. Space. Darker than anything I have ever seen. I realize that this little micro Universe is my pain. An old pain, it doesn’t exist anymore – and now it’s a memory in the shape of fear.

I suddenly understand that inside this dark Universe is everything I have ever known about myself. About life. About love. Pleasure. Happiness. It is so tiny – but when I am floating around in it – it feels infinite. Once I am inside it, it is a closed world, it becomes my everything and I become the only detail inside it. I can’t see that the world outside is infinite, and that I’m just swallowed up by a ridiculous little stain – insignificant even though it’s packed with pain.

Once I am consumed with this world, swallowed up by it and reconciled with the pain, I feel free. There is just me and the dark void. Nothing else. Just like Sandra Bullock in “Gravity”, I tumble and fall through space and I am lost in my direction – letting the darkness take me wherever it wants me to go. Deeper inside. I let go of any resistance. I let it take me deeper inside. I am so lost – but I feel part of something familiar and absolute. There is nothing but me and the familiarity of the darkness. Nothing can hurt me here. Because I am already floating through the pain or the memory of it.

It is my ‘Painiverse’.

The fear of revisiting this place is so overwhelming that I dive right into it, to feel a sense of control. Like an emotional suicide.

The light scares me, more than anything. The light isn’t infinite – it has sharp edges. I don’t know what’s behind those edges – perhaps it’s my Painiverse. The light is blinding me. There is no sense of familiarity in it, only confusion.

I know that light isn’t infinite. It is always slowly dying or being replaced by darkness. I know that I won’t be able to feel free to be all consumed by it, to tumble around in it and to feel part of it. Sometimes I envy religious people, I think they know this light like a home.

Maybe it will take me a lifetime to be able to feel at home in the light, and to forget where the dark stain is so I won’t be attracted its gravity and swallowed by it. The light might not be as deep and overwhelming as my Painiverse, but it is not a memory – it is something real and new. Fresh.

I don’t want to feel the familiarity of the dark anymore. I don’t want to be lost.

But how can I trust that the edges of light won’t be portals to that place?

This is my dilemma.

What a Saturday inspiration treat looks like in my life.

My friends all know that it’s Christmas throughout all the seasons of the year in my apartment. I have always loved Christmas and keep Christmas decorations up all year round.

The autumn is finally here with its vibrant colors and melancholic skies. I love this season, but it will be over in just a few weeks when winter will come and take its place. My new life is still, after living in my new apartment for 4 months, very much a work in progress. I can feel something is shifting, not just the seasons. Perhaps the hard work I’m putting into my self therapy and overcoming my fears is finally translating itself to actual behavior and new ways of thinking. But I’m still in the process of shaking off old behavior, old convictions and fears. I had no idea how difficult it would be to start over in life (not like moving someplace new and changing relationship status, but really and truly starting over – to move forward, away from everything I’ve ever known). At times, I feel like just giving up, like it’s too hard and I can’t do it. But I can’t give up, not now -because I have nothing to go back to. I’ve already left so much pain behind, I’ve abandoned so many false realities, destructive behavior and masochistic indulgences. I know too much, I can’t pretend like I don’t understand that I have to change and then just give up and go on like I have always lived my life. No, I am too far away from my old self, and I’m too committed to who I am becoming to be able to quit now. I just have to keep going, to keep moving forward. Some days in a very, very slow pace. The frustration is always present.

But I will remember this time as a healthy process. A necessary pain, to be able to reach the other side of the tunnel which I’ve been walking through for so many years. I have come so far, I am working so hard – I just have to keep going.

I am changing color, and letting the dead leaves drop. I feel so connected to this year’s autumn. Like I’m part of nature, in a very special way.

Something I found in my Facebook feed:

I have been focused on finding my way out of the overwhelming fear I feel when it comes to love. It is unbearable at times. My trauma is the color which I’m painting the present with. Until its all covered in a dense, oily, black texture, suffocating my sense of reality. It’s all blurred. The past, present and the future. A confusing mix of time, painful memories and cruel fantasies. What is real? And what is a memory of a future?

I know this is a crucial point in my life. This is where I’ll either make another mistake, like the continuation of my old repertoire – falling in love and letting love destroy me until I leave it and look for another love to destroy me in a new way. A different way. Or, this is where I am a pioneer – a rebel, who’s refusing to go where the pain feels familiar and welcoming. This is where I am in control, where I have the power to create whatever I want, instead of letting life create situations and traps for me where I feel helpless and lost. I refuse to be a guest in my own life again. It’s such a humiliation to victimize oneself like that. You abandoned yourself, you abandoned life and in the end, you abandoned your sense of control, until your perception of the world is so flat and dry that it looks and feels like a box, with nothing inside. I’ve been trapped in my own coffin a number of times. Death is only an unbearable concept when it happens while you are still breathing. It’s absurd how easy death can replace life without any warning. How it’s the perfect doppelganger for life – dressed up in routines, boredom, numbness, indifference and self deception. The real death is when you lose yourself. I’ve died so many times.

Life, is a place where you constantly find yourself. Every day. It’s sad how our self images are shattered at some point in our childhood, and we are forced to spend the rest of our lives trying to find the pieces and putting ourselves back together again. Most likely we will not succeed. We will always feel like some pieces are missing. Perhaps even the most important pieces. That’s life’s cruelest joke. We are born naked in the world, and to ourselves where our only identity is vulnerability, but from that day, our nakedness will always be hidden behind shame, guilt or fear. The vulnerability will be considered as a weakness. We will do anything to suppress our true nature. And the irony is that our biggest, most frustrating hobby – is trying to create another, vicarious identity to replace the one we rejected at some point.

Most likely, we will try to buy that identity, or least the sense of it. We can choose to be whoever we want to be – it’s just a matter of finding the right costume and make up, attitudes, values, things, goals, achievements, lifestyles and the fulfillment they’re supposed to create inside our shattered selves.

To find our identity by looking at our own true nature is very difficult when everything in modern society is based on the idea that you are supposed buy it instead. You want to be a popular person? Just follow the rules of beauty and success. You want to be a rebel? Just follow the political concept of a criminal or an activist. You want to be adventurous? Just visit a lot of countries around the world or buy a session of bungyjump, car racing or whatever experience you want.

And if you should fall in love, there is a pre- made package for you to buy – a modern relationship with certain routines, dreams, sensations, achievements and goals to follow. And when you still don’t feel happy, sexually satisfied or emotionally and spirituality fulfilled, you will numb it and surrender to the idea that this is what life is, that it’s all you are gonna get out of it. And then you make peace with it all, and stop looking for the missing pieces – the missing pieces of your perception of love, life, happiness, pleasure, life and yourself. You replace the purpose of your existence with a feeling of being content enough to maintain a healthy life.

Artists, musicians, writers, poets and actors know that there’s magic in life. Magic that you can create with your mind, your emotions, your inner stories and the multiverse of our inner worlds. Magic you don’t buy, but create from scratch. Something that you bring into the world, something you decorate and highlight reality with. Something magical that didn’t exist before you created it.

Since it’s so hard to find the missing pieces we lost in our childhood, we create them in our art instead. These creative expressions are painfully genuine and works as a public reminder of our own missing pieces – that is what makes art into magic.

And we can do this outside the canvases, instruments, papers and the studio. We can create magic in anything we want – in life, love, sex and within ourselves. But it takes a lot of courage and effort because society is putting a big pressure on us to not do this. To break free from the pre made packages, the numbness and the comfortably uncomfortable or perhaps the other way around, the already thought out ideals, values, sexual orientations and attitudes, the faked pleasure, happiness and fulfillment – the lost dreams and the failed sense of identity. Being OK with life in a box, with nothing but every day routines inside and everything else outside it.

I can’t do that. I feel more scared of being emotionally numb than I am scared of death. I will create magic in my life, in every way I can. Especially in love and sex. I am already creating magic with my art so I have proved to myself that I’m able to do it.

Now, I just have to keep experimenting with life, love, sex in the same way.

I won’t ever surrender, not even to the magic, I want to find more, look further, go beyond. This is what I want out of life. And it’s not for sale.

The truth about myself and my nature never frightens me – it’s the fantastic and creative ways that it’s been neglected or wasted that is scary to me.

I have always felt a little creeped out by the cases for my glasses.. It reminds me of a coffin. Death is always lurking around in the most bizarre places…

MY LATEST ART INTERVIEW BY JENS DANIEL BURMAN – ROUGHLY TRANSLATED:

– Who is Mia Makila? –

If Pippi Longstocking and Bergman ever had a love child – it would be me. I have that depth, seriousness and a delicate sensitivity in me. Maybe it’s my Finnish heritage. The melancholia. I also have a rebel in me – someone who goes against the mainstream ideas of things and who’s happily lifting a horse every now and then. The playfulness. The need for freedom. And the red hair of course. I am a melancholic and filthy Pippi. Old / young. I feel both antique in the heart where the painful wisdom is boiling, but I also have a child’s imagination. Both have humor. The dark humor is important to me. And to tell the truth and to be honest. It permeates everything I do. Even if the truth is a fuzzy concept.

– What scared you as a child? –

Shadows. I was terribly afraid of shadows when I was a little girl. I could not understand why a dark figure would insist on stalking me wherever I would go. When I was a little girl sitting in the back seat of our car, I pulled up the legs and screamed like hell because of the strange shadows on the back of the driver’s seat. In order to mitigate these experiences I had a security blanket – old nylon stockings with three holes in it, I sucked on it during car trips. It sounds more kinky than it was.

– Tell me about your art? –

I create mostly digital art, ie, photo manipulation and digital collages, using PhotoShop (and coffee), but I also paint in acrylic on canvas or wooden panels. I have no unified style, because I create both digitally and with brushes so it will be completely different expressions and techniques, but there is a a common theme throughout everything I create; strong and tough expression straight out of my mind, and from my burning and bleeding core.

I already knew when I was five years old that I would become an artist. I made a collage of half-naked ladies from perfume ads I cut out of the mother’s Femina and  embarrassed my parents by showing them to everyone. I have always liked to provoke and to see people’s reactions to what I have created. A small god complex, perhaps, or a way to be seen. Reaching out – and all the way to the core.

My art is referred to as ‘horror art’ or ‘lowbrow’. Sometimes ‘pop surrealism’. None of these genres is especially established here in Sweden, almost no gallery owner I have talked with in Sweden have known the term “pop surrealism”. Therefore, I am mostly active overseas, or I send my works to international exhibitions and is quite famous in these genres. I have built a huge network of artists all over the world. There, I feel welcome and like I am making sense. In Sweden, nobody gets what I’m doing. My cock-lolitas and anxiety demons are so non-swedish. They demand space, they are loud and creating scenes. “Fuck it! Here I come!”. It is liberating. But I think many people think I’m crazy, which is OK for me. Rather crazy than normal. For real.

– Can you share any plans for the future? – 

I’ve been gone a few years from the art. I was hit suddenly by a creativity crisis – which later became an identity crisis, depression and in the end resulted in a burnout. I just started painting again. And I will create an entirely new collection of work that I will be exhibiting in Sweden for a year or so. This time, both the Pippi Longstocking and Bergman raise their voices and I will be more of everything that people like with me. More of me and more craziness too.

Then I want to write. Books. And short stories. And all that would come out will come out. I am really looking forward to it.

More exhibitions abroad. Preferably several major group exhibitions. It feels fantastic to exhibit with the artists I  look up to!

– What a movie, book or art makes you tremble from fear? –

All religious scriptures. They are so full of prejudices, outdated ideas and really boring stories. Then they bring bigotry, war, shit and misery. No, I get depressed just thinking about it.

I am also really scared of illustrated medical books, I am such a hypochondriac.

– What makes you crawl into bed and hide under the covers? – 

When my dark past comes back for a little visit.

– Do you have any skeletons in the closet? –

No, I’ve cleaned out that closet in therapy. But I have old love letters, some latex face masks from old photo projects in my closet. And some vibrators course.

– The nastiest place you been to? –

My apartment during the five years I lived with an abuser.

– Favorite Monster? –

Mårran in Tove Jansson’s books. She’s fat like a great mountain. A snuggle-monster.

LINK TO THE SWEDISH INTERVIEW HERE