Fire and Ice: Struggle as an Aesthetic Experience

John Dewey and Having an Emotional Experience (Art as Experience, pp. 42-45)

Two months ago, when I should’ve been more concerned with how I needed to get serious about a Jung final due in twelve hours with barely any meat on the skeletal template I made, I woke up with a profound regret.

It’s still difficult to talk in public about my reason for abandoning a creative project that meant a lot to me while conceiving and creating it, but let’s just take a sworn vow of understanding that life got very tough and too much mentally was in the way of my confidence to produce the creativity needed for the project consistently. It’s been nearly three years, and so much of the regret is in how much I allowed my years of struggle to strip myself away from something I really wanted to do. (This struggle I now know was/is autistic/adhd burnout, but that knowledge changes nothing for the better and everything for the more upsetting.) Writing this newsletter, I realize there’s more sadness about this “failure” than I thought I’d have. Failure of time, effort, future potential unrealized… I feel like I failed at a dream I had— I still have.

But the funny thing is, I gave up because I had no more to give at the time, though it meant so much to me. I pressed pause, intending to return sooner than later, but what I’ve been revisited with is that depression is wicked and mean as hell. Because how much could’ve been done to reach my desired life if I had stuck with it? Over the years of my hiatus away from this creative project, I’ve gotten sad and frustrated about how I should’ve just pushed through and persevered even when my life and energy were lower than the bottom of a chasm; that something significant, like the help I so desperately needed to get it gone would’ve…could’’ve arrived if I’d just stuck it out. But how much could’ve been done to reach my desired life if I was too stuck in the mud to trudge forward, anyway? That question, that thought, gnaws at my bone marrow because I feel like I held myself back. But as I take rejection after rejection after loss after dead-end, it’s clear that life has held me back even more.

I’m sure my second favorite My Hero Academia character, Shoto Todoroki, can relate to the regret of holding oneself back from their ultimate goal because life has been so unfair and unkind.

Though our reasons for self-sabotaging our dreams are fueled by different things—Shoto’s hatred for his father’s abusive ambition over his inherited fire Quirk and my fear of being perceived while not operating at my best—our realizations are the same: we can’t run away from any part of ourselves if we are to meet our ultimate goal.

Shoto’s backstory is full of some familiar themes as mine: paternal familial abuse and neglect, high expectations, high aptitude, struggles that are deeply internalized to the point of shutting the world out, and skills that others feel intimidated by and think are merely signs of being “gifted” and not being tortured by a painful life. His brooding air claimed him as enigmatic and elusive at UA, but only two people noticed his sadness— Izuku Midoriya and me. Rewatching Shoto come to terms with his self-sabotage in season one made me think about how self-sabotage works as an effective but counterproductive shield. It protects from experiencing the bad stuff, yes, but it also…always blocks the good too. Shoto’s talents made him one of the two UA hero course students accepted by recommendation alone. Still, his potential was capped before he realized how strong, powerful, and capable he was. Thankfully, he met someone who saw him for who he truly was and committed himself out of sheer respect for his peer and opponent to bring that out of him before it was lost for good.

Sometimes, I wonder why I’ve had a life full of such distinct struggles, struggles that are too personal to even share in the digital space's public ether. I’ve had spiritual battles that no child should’ve experienced and found their direct links with neurodivergence struggles that many auDHD kids of Color who grew up in abusive religious/hyper-spiritual homes experience (one day, I’ll outline those parallels for others, but I have to heal those wounds first). But more than anything, I’ve felt the pricking of not reaching my full potential for whatever reason was out of my control. I’ve felt so puppeteered by the abuses of life, maybe even of God, that no matter how hard I’ve tried to push through it, I’ve been stopped. Kind of like when Izuku finally manages to break through Shoto’s defenses during their Sports Festival battle, triggering Shoto to use his ice for the first time, and then Endeavor’s arrogant bitch ass just had to shout proudly from the stands and ruin it all. The way Shoto froze (pun intended)? Yeah, I felt that.

John Dewey briefly wrote about Struggle as an aesthetic experience.

“Struggle and conflict may be themselves enjoyed, although they are painful, when they are experienced as means of developing an experience…Otherwise there would be no taking in of what preceded…it involves reconstruction which may be painful” (p. 42)

The experience of struggle or conflict hurts, but the process of reconstructing oneself or the experience itself stretches the imagination to perceive something beyond the current pain. It is the struggle of metamorphosis— leaving what’s in the past behind through painful, evolutionary means to create and be something new…different. Like a butterfly. Like a dual-quirked pro hero. So what if I never go back to revisit that old project? So what if life never stops shoving struggle down my throat?

So what?

Maybe that project, that version of myself and my life that’s been hovering in stasis in the past, isn’t dead but metamorphosizing. Maybe the past is like fire forging my future self, and the future is frozen until I release it from its stasis of potential. Maybe the past version of my endeavors is begging not to be frozen in their present state because the future blazes an unknown and uncertain trail of reimagination and creative freedom yet untapped. Maybe I’m holding onto the pain of my past because life can’t keep sabotaging that.