melancholy with reason

The world feels like a shitshow, so I've been diving into art, dreaming up new designs for our fixer-upper, attempting to read, and writing about witches under my pseudonym. Shields up, you know? Protection mode on.

And that's why it hurts a little more when artists whose work I admire turn out to be monsters. They were allowed in the bubble! Reading about Neil Gaiman… Ugh.

It's like when I found out J.K. Rowling was not Harry Potter (or Hermione). I stared at my first edition hardcovers of the series with knots in my stomach. I should have been clued-in by the racist character names, but I'm a Gen X Asian-American raised on John Hughes movies by a schizophrenic Asian mother. I loved Breakfast at Tiffany's. When I think of all the racism I saw and felt, I can only imagine what I overlooked because, you know, we watched The Dukes of Hazzard as a family.

I'm a poet who loves to read as much poetry as I can. Dive into the lives of poets who write beautifully, and you'll sometimes find more beasts. If only I didn't want to know about their lives! Stupid curiosity!

How about you? Are you able to enjoy the art when you know too much about the artist? Am I overthinking it? Because I do that. I'm twenty minutes from talking with my therapist about that tendency.

(Photo of me and Soups wondering about the world.)