To end one of our typical actionless evenings that we are usually bumming through after a regular work day, The Fiancé and I watched the movie "Frida" with Salma Hayek last night. I had never seen it before, and I didn't think it was a particularly good or particularly bad movie - but in the end it sparked this really inspiring and good conversation between The Fiancé and I, about what the hell are we doing with our lives, and why are we not living it the way we want to.

You see, Frida Kahlo wasn't a particularly good painter by all measures of "technique". Her paintings were anatomically grotesque to say at best, and her use of color would have driven every Renaissance master up the wall in frustration. Yet she painted - she painted a lot, and her paintings are so full of expression and emotion that in the end it doesn't matter whether that the feet were too small for the rest of the body, or the hands fold in an unnatural way. She painted what she was feeling, and was not bothered by rules and restrictions of anatomy or technicalities.

To see why this is so important for our lives, you have to understand the following: The Fiancé is an incredibly skilled artist. He knows human anatomy like few other people I know, and he is full of awesome ideas for drawings, paintings... or whatever other project comes to his mind. He starts with these awesome emotion-filled sketches, but gets frustrated and discouraged a few days into his project and starts a new one, trying to make it "better" than the first one, without ever finishing anything. On top of that his drawings always end up stiff and robot-like, technical, and boring to look at from an emotional point of view. Why? Because he is trying to compare himself with the likes of Michelangelo or Botticelli, and every sketch of his that does not fulfill these self-inflicted standards of impossibility are, to him, not worth the paper they were drawn upon. He spends hours and hours on one pose, drawing and redrawing it, hoping for the perfect proportion, the perfect flow of movement, the perfect anatomy. If he never gets there (and most of the time he only gets to an awesome approximation), he gets depressed for days, puts away his sketchpad, and laments on how inept of an artist he is, and how he will never measure up to anything or anybody.

Me? I am not so much driven in one direction only in my creative approaches the way The Fiancé is, but I am struggling with a smiliar problem. I am not limiting myself to the fine arts, I see a lot of potential within me on many different levels: I have sufficient talent to draw. I am musically adept. I know how to write. I am good at photography. However, I am barely scratching the surface of all these things, I am trying to force myself to "decide" on where my "true" passion lies, and I get confused and frustrated, and I reached the point where I do none of these things anymore, because it is too hard to untangle my brain, and let the creative juices flow in whatever direction they would like to. I make excuses for myself and on why not to do any of these things, and by now I have myself sufficiently convinced that I am not good at anything, that I truly believe it. Writing? I know how to put one word next to another to make them sound good together, but I have no stories in my head to tell. Drawing? I know how to move a pencil about a blank sheet of paper, but I have no images in my head to express. Playing music? I know how to copy what others have done, but there is no music flowing from my heart into my instrument. Fotography? I have the tools to shoot the best of pictures, but I do not know where to look for and how to capture emotion with my expensive technical device.

At first sight, The Fiancé's and my problems seem to be different, but really they are not, and it took Frida's biography for us to realize this. We both give ourselves a huge load of horseshit of excuses to justify why we are NOT doing what we have this inner urge to do. We both know that we are not "like others", and that we are not satisfied with the cookie-cutter life we currently are leading, that every other "normal" person is leading. We both know from the bottom of our hearts that we are artists, artisans, bohemes, yet we are hiding this true self safely away behind this cloak of every day life and excuses on why things have to be the way they are, and this cloak works so well, that we even manage to kid ourselves and each other successfully.

The Fiancé does not finish any of his pieces because they are technically incorrect, therefore sacrificing all emotion or passion he may have felt for them when he first thought them up. He thinks he will never have his own gallery opening and nobody will ever have the right to call his pieces "good", unless they could be mistaken for Da Vinci's. I do not sit down and write my book because even though it may be technically correct "nobody will publish it anyway", and I do not sit down and paint because "there is no point" to my paintings, I play no more music because "I can only copy, and who will consider me a good musician if I can't even improvise", and I am hesitant about taking pictures because my technically correct images seem so stiff and emotionless even to myself.

Excuses! What in the world keeps The Fiancé from walking up to his easel and to put all his emotions onto his canvas, and NOT caring whether or not his figures are correct? Why can I not reach for a slab of clay and start to sculpt my emotions into one piece of art, not caring whether or not I have the "proper training" to be a sculptor? Why are we both so hung up on technicalities, that we cannot see our talents and skills and work with them and our hearts as we should???

Frida Kahlo seemed not to have been held back by such thoughts. She felt and she painted. Simple as that. What a huge inspiration to the both of us.

Our conversation lasted until deep into the night... during which I underwent all sorts of emotional transformations: from envy to frustration to helplessness to confusion to anger to excitement to motivation. When I finally fell asleep in The Fiancé's embrace, I felt as if we had just made love- so strong was the feeling of connection with him, and reaffirmation of our similar outlooks on life and desire of how to approach it that is different from most other people. He himself was unable to sleep for another few hours, filled with thoughts about the things we had talked about. He looked beaten this morning, but also hopeful and motivated.

I will truly try not to let myself get distracted anymore by the mundane and boring but neccessary things such as work, and will try to truly live out what already lives inside my head and desperately tries to be let out. Afterall, we are not NORMAL people, we are not the status quo, and I see no reason why we should spend our life in the mold of normalcy like everybody else does.

As a start, I have my camera with me now at all times, and I shall be damned if I will not take a minute's time to get it out and start shooting if I feel the need to, instead of suppressing it and walking right along in the pursuit of the "responsible" things in life.

And... who would have thought... the second this decision was made, images start to tentatively take shape in my head once more...