‘A Private Civil War’ is my most recent work, and is a semi autobiographical monologue in relation to living in what I call a ‘cult of self-belief’.
This work is more than anything about the crisis of knowing oneself in age that is perpetually telling us to be just that, our selves, but with attached conditions and requirements; that is, a self that is conducive with being successful via the market-based competition of neoliberalism, a culture I call ‘a cult of self-belief’.
It’s obviously got semi-autobiographical tones. A truth, my truth, being that I never really feel I have created an identity, I feel identity-less.
Or at least I’ve never successfully created an ‘Identity in Capitalism’ (a weird term, but I think it works…?). I always found it near impossible to become, in a sense of becoming something, often feeling like I exist in the shadows of those who are made manifest, be it,by their own or others’ hands.
I spent most of my out of work time in my 20s and early 30s, on trains, buses, and admittedly pubs, anywhere to escape the growing alarm call to ‘self actualise’, as I literally just didn’t know how, and I’d feel a sense of paralysis at the very ask to choose what I was.
Once I hit the slow approaching ice berg of ‘turning 30’, I kind of fell into my own inner monologue, a deeply self critical one, toxic space, full of confused and frustrated morality injunctions into the debate about why I still hadn’t ‘become’, why I still hadn’t found a life(style) etc that I wish to exist in. I entered ‘a private civil war’ that I’m still more or less within.
But I think/hope the work can extend to other peoples’ experiences. If only due to how many others likely found themselves falling into their own inner monologue during this age of lockdowns and isolation.
Of course, many people, especially those who know me, would reject my feelings of being of failure. But we all do this for others don’t we? We all see others’ as manifest and confident, whilst we are plagued by doubt. So, more than anything I hope this work can shed light on what I believe is a big ‘public secret’ fuelling the fires of much identity politics in the pre and post-covid age; the feeling of being left behind, of having been mis-recognised, and more than anything, of having failed.
There are many reasons I’ve wanted to fuse the idea of self actualisation with tree shapes, and depicting, even merging the idea of a psyche with that of an ecology, that is managed, mismanaged, damaged, and rebuilt. But none more than using the unique shape trees take almost as a direct conversation with their immediate environment, as a form in which to discuss the being human, in an age where being ‘self made’ (be it through in terms of money, or lifestyle, or character) very much overshadows the experience of the power of our external environment, that literally make us sometimes feel like plants bending in the wind and twisting and turning for sunlight.
John B Ledger 