Can Both Be True?
On art and learning to hold two things at once.
My therapist has a question he keeps asking: Can both be true?
For most of my life, the honest answer was no. From childhood, I could only make sense of my world by seeing it in black and white: all in or all out, good or bad, safe or not. Holding two opposite things at the same time felt impossible, even dangerous. I picked a side and stayed committed. Longing for what I didn’t have was not only easier than sitting in the middle of something complicated. It was romantic. Electric. The very thing I gave to Mia.
The strange thing is that the one place I could always hold both was art.
A song that was heartbreaking and beautiful at the very same time, and somehow more beautiful because it’s breaking your heart, like Joni Mitchell singing “River.” Or a poem that holds grief and gratitude in the same breath, like “The Journey” by Mary Oliver. A few months ago, I bought a painting in Charlotte, North Carolina, by a self-taught folk artist named Nellie Ashford. Her work is full of color and life: children, music, community. And woven right through it is the weight of the segregated South she grew up in. Joy and hardship, in the same frame, neither one canceling the other. The painting doesn’t resolve it for you. It just lets both be true.
When I started writing my novel, I gave my main character that exact struggle. She can only feel both things at once in front of a painting — never quite in her own life. And writing her, I realized I’d been doing the same thing. Practicing, in front of canvases and inside songs, the thing I couldn’t yet do with my own contradictions. Art was the safe room where both could be true.
It’s getting easier now. Out in my actual life, not just in a gallery. Maybe that’s what art is for — a place to practice holding what’s too hard to hold any other way.
Where do you feel both things at once? Is there a song, a painting, a poem that lets you?