Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash

So, I just finished watching Season 4 of The Handmaid’s Tale. Fucking brilliance!

For the ones who haven’t seen it, please leave RIGHT NOW and go watch the marvellous creation that’s been tearing hearts and fucking minds. Based on a book by the aweeee-fucking-static Margaret Atwood, this story has been wrenching my heart out while also acting as a healer to my dry eyes. The genius of tears.

We see how June (the protagonist) played by the naive Peggy in Mad Men (how the fuck are you so great Elisabeth Moss?!) is snatched off of her life, her homeland, and her body – we see how she takes inspiration from the person she was forced to become after going through horrendous ordeals. We see her living a nightmare in each and every episode from Season 1 to Season 4 until she is finally able to hit back and take the revenge that would somehow ease her completely broken self, a self that’s been violated to no end.

The story makes you bite your teeth out of fear, as you live the worst humans can come to. It also gives you hope over how only the worst can make you realize your strength.

For most of my life now, I stay stupefied at the gigantic potential residing within all of us. Random dialogues leave a lasting impression and act as a brick of strength for years to come. I have words by strangers pasted all over my room, it seems like the walls around me will soon resemble an art museum playing symphonies etched in books, poems, films, and songs.

If I could open one half of my brain, it would have a stream of these highs where I’ve jumped with joy over witnessing or reading beauty and imbibing it into my system. A mix of multiple worlds that sing in a multi-cultural chorus and regurgitate like a happy giant when I feel a desire to get them out of my system. Sometimes, it’s indescribable, and yet I look around me and can’t get enough of how much more there is to digest out there. The world is fucking huge!

I mean just hear this out –

“So, Margot dreamed of becoming a model, and then a film star. This transition seemed to her quite a simple matter: the sky was there, ready for her star”- Laughter in the dark, Vladimir Nabokov

Right here is another genius in the art of language. And if you look at this in the form of grammar nonsense, it is illogical and brainless. Ready for her star, what does it even mean? Greatness is created when you show the big finger to logic and rules, and move far away from the herd- and still make sense that is so strong that it can make people laugh and cry uncontrollably. That is pure power.

The more I consume the more enraptured I am. Of course, not with the mindless Instagram scrolling- that really doesn’t give me much to be enraptured by. Maybe a bit, but there is too much junk on the top to find the real treasures out there.

But the movies, the books, the thoughtful articles, that’s the real shit that makes me say

Alright, this is where I’d like to be someday.

This brings me to another instance of what I recently felt a few days ago. We went to Van Gogh’s museum and boy was it a dream. That dude lived the hardest life, he was in such a bad space and no one gave a fuck, well, until he died. There is not a single soul on this planet who doesn’t know Van Gogh. Probably the most popular artist, but what about when he was alive?

He cut off his own ear, such was his mental pain. He drew non-stop to calm himself, I’m going to be reading mountains of stuff on him as he inspires me. He inspires our whole generation by showcasing how the deepest despair can be let out in the form of art. I haven’t reached that level yet to understand the intricacies of paintings, details, colors, shadows, and the depth of visual art. It is beyond my comprehension.

But what moved me was his story, I wasn’t moved by the sketch of the bright sunflowers- I was able to see how he would have drawn those sunflowers while sitting in the park of his asylum, or maybe his house around idiotic neighbors who treated him like shit for being ‘abnormal’. I could see his painting of a shoe, and could imagine him closeted inside his tiny bedroom with nothing but a pair of shoes waiting to be drawn for lack of enough subjects around him, just anything to keep himself busy, to avoid the dangerous, suicidal thoughts from lurking in- the whispers getting louder.

If you’ve been to a beginner’s sketching workshop- you draw the flowers around you or a famous portrait of an actor.

You re-create what you see around you until you can reach that stage of drawing out your imagination.

Van Gogh drew what he saw, and added a character to it- a character deeper than the opera. His paintings move like a film, and we can see them as we know him, we understand him!

The genius and the greatness of art, in the end, is always the artist.