I Hope You Hate Clowns and Me

When I was a teenager, my parents told me to paint flowers. Naturally, I painted a gigantic killer clown.

I love clowns the way most people love chocolate: indulgently and with very little interest in pretending I don’t. I love their bright features and questionable intentions. There is a mystery to clowns. No one knows what they’re looking at, yet their brain convinces them that they do. You see the creepy smile, crazy hair, and stereotypical red ball nose, and your brain fails you. You mistake perception for truth; you forget that you are looking at a human being long before you are seeing a clown. This truth always strolls in as an afterthought, which prompts confusion because a clown cannot exist without a human. There is always a person underneath it all.

As my clown collection grows, I increasingly unveil a certain level of pride and satisfaction in people’s contorted faces and disgusted stares. While most artists seek validation in words like “pretty” or “beautiful,” I find them to be the embodiment of an insult, which feels hypocritical considering the immense weight those same words carry in my personal life.

Why is beauty the epitome of failure in my artwork, but the ultimate measure of success in my existence?

The same way the sky is blue, women are born into a swamp of unattainable beauty standards. From the second we enter the world, we are forced to play a game that prevents us from scoring. Deeply embedded notions are tangled into the minds of generations before us that attempt to strap us into a mold. It becomes our duty to bathe in education in order to unlearn the need for validation from those who never understood us to begin with. It is almost instinctual, trained into us alongside womanhood itself: the belief that we need a nod of approval from a man before we can trust that we are deserving of the space we occupy.

For someone so perplexed by the mere concept of being disliked, clowns were a bold choice. For a long time, I felt like I was one insult away from completely shattering, that if everyone did not love me and my artwork, I could not possibly be worthy of anything at all. Not to spoil the ending, but the shattering never came in a singular moment. Instead, I unraveled slowly and gracefully; I lost myself so patiently that I did not even know it was happening. It was exactly how I imagine stepping into quicksand and only recognizing the danger once it is too late: the initial blame for allowing yourself to get this far, the panic, the struggle, the call for help, and finally, the painful realization that there is no climbing out unchanged.

As the years passed, I accepted the contradiction as part of who I was: the girl who preached about not caring what anyone said but slept with critic reviews every night. Eventually, nothing was enough. Not the number on the scale. Not the girl in the mirror. Not the stretch marks, cellulite dents, uneven eyebrows, or teeth that needed braces a long time ago. I picked myself apart until there was hardly a whole person left to criticize. Every imperfection became another reason to shrink. Another reason to apologize. Another reason to believe I had, wholeheartedly, not yet earned the right to take up space, and therefore, neither did my artwork.

In a subconscious effort to deprive myself of joy, and a conscious effort to become everything I ever wanted to be, which really just meant good enough, my studio door remained shut. For over two years, my paintbrushes crusted at the edges, and rust grew upon the door hinge. This was my punishment for not being everything people wanted me to be, everything society told me I had to be, and everything I believed I needed to become to deserve a beating heart and a healthy mind. Clowns and art became an unattainable reward when it should've been an outlet.

On a recent Tuesday, I found the courage to walk back into my studio. A part of me hoped I would walk in and realize that the years away from the thing I loved most, was worth it. That maybe I wouldn't like my clowns anymore and I could start painting over them with flowers or painfully boring woodsy scenes. But, no. I felt pure, childhood-like joy when I looked at my clowns. Crooked smiles, big noses, uneven eyes, enormous faces, expressions that could keep someone up at night. They were loud, strange, imperfect, and entirely uninterested in being beautiful. Yet, somehow, they lit a candle in me I thought had burned out long ago.

I had spent years offering my clowns a freedom I had never offered myself. I let them be ugly. I let them be unsettling. I let them take up an obscene amount of space without apologizing for any of it. Meanwhile, I had been running on the hamster wheel of beauty, chasing an impossible perfection and waiting for someone else to tell me when I could finally stop. Maybe that is the cruelest consequence of everything we are taught: no one tells us there is no finish line. We run until we forget that our current state is not merely satisfactory, but enough. Then, we eventually stop running. Not because someone finally nods in approval, but because of the certainty and joy that stir in our guts when we stop asking permission to exist as we are.

We, especially as women, need to be clowns in a sea of princesses. We need to reject the exhausting pursuit of beauty and palatability, and the idea that being visually desirable is somehow the most important thing a woman can be. How brainwashed we must be to want people to see beauty in us before wanting them to feel what I did when viewing my clowns: an all-consuming warmth of joy, comfort, peace, and curiosity.

There is a human underneath all of the makeup, clothes, and opinions of others that have unknowingly seeped into our individual self-perception. We are women deserving of long looks and daring stares, not for the way our boobs sit in our shirts, but for the way we make people laugh. For the way we care and love, even when it seems impossible to everyone else. How we look is painfully irrelevant compared to who we truly are and how we make people feel. Someday, when our time is up, no one will talk about how our bellies looked in our shirts. Not a single person will stand at our funerals and discuss the smoothness of our skin or the size of our pores. All the imperfections we spent years picking apart will suddenly become painfully irrelevant. Upon death, beauty becomes one of the least important things about us, yet somehow, validation becomes the compass we follow while we are alive.

I will never stand to believe an artist owes their viewers an explanation, but I figured I would spare everyone the curiosity.

I paint clowns to remind myself that I will forever be a human before anything else.

I paint clowns to know that how I look is not a correlation to who I truly am.

I paint clowns to see people’s faces twist and turn, and to bathe in their discomfort, knowing they are squirming at a perception while I am beaming at the human I built.

So, I hope you hate clowns, and I hope you hate me. I hope you know that you don’t even know what you’re hating at all because, at the end of the day, a clown cannot exist without a human. There is always a person underneath it all.