I’ve spent most of my life trying to silence the chaos in my head, but somehow, there is only a relentless stream of everything I should have done yesterday and everything I need to do tomorrow. The only thing I truly know about myself is that I worry. Every second that passes, every minute, every week, I worry. I worry about school tomorrow. The pile of washed clothes I need to fold. The movies I need to watch. The album I haven’t listened to. The essay I need to write. The books that are collecting dust on my desk. The shower I need to take. At night, all of those thoughts combine together to create a long, disorganized train that is seemingly never-ending. In the morning when I look in the mirror, my eye bags are a direct reflection of that. My thoughts have been yelling at me and screaming in my ear until my actual voice is silenced. It felt like I couldn’t hear myself for the longest time – all I did hear were my thoughts more than I heard my own voice speaking. My headaches were the physical reminder that the train of thoughts wouldn’t stop, it felt infinite. It was infinite. Even when I tried to be the conductor of these thoughts, to pull the lever of the train and slow it down a bit, it felt impossible.
In the dense fog of worry, however, there was one place where the train slowed down.
The museum. The Met in New York City. Art pieces in the grand, sunny-lit hallways allowed me to escape the chaos and to see the beauty in stillness. Standing in front of centuries-old sculptures, or perhaps replicas of them, I find myself lost in the details of the sculpture. One of them, titled “The Veiled Woman”, stood out to me. The fractures on the cheeks of her face. The longing eyes and curly hair. I wonder what kind of woman she was – the brave, eternally loving one, or the afraid, invisible, background character of society. Maybe a bit of both, or maybe none of those at all. I wonder about her dreams and fears and inspirations. There is something so entrancing about looking at a piece of history from hundreds of thousands of years ago, the little details only humans could create. While looking at the shawl wrapped around her, a thought came to me, but instead of a yell, it came in a soft voice that felt truly like mine; that there is a hidden beauty in the fractured and unfinished. The chipped nose and missing arm, I realized, was reminding me that I am a work in progress too.
Between those quiet moments of observation in a museum and my own experiences of art and my worries about it, museums help me be present in a way that is incomparable to any other feeling I’ve had, and whether I’m trying to find my emotions in writing, or feeling the pressure of wanting to be seen and heard, what I do know is that when I stepped into the arched pillars made of marble and in a crowd of New Yorkers, what I’ve come to realize is that I’m an observer of these thoughts – I can acknowledge the train, but I’m not the train itself. I am not my thoughts.
Just like that middle-aged man staring at a painting or the children mesmerized by ancient artifacts, I’ve found my own fascination in storytelling; on stage, through writing, and with my once silenced voice. Art and museums may not completely get rid of the train running through my head, but they offer an opportunity for me to step back and observe my thoughts in a new perspective. For once, I feel like I’m pulling the lever, slowly. Museums, in their silent stillness, spark something within me that makes me realize how lucky we are to be here, surrounded by both the beauty of history and the potential for what’s yet to come. And every now and then, I find a moment–a break in the running train of thoughts, where I can breathe and just exist, and I can allow thoughts to pass without letting them define me.
