The advantages of having a brother with a high degree of dependency is that you can’t let yourself go. Unlike children with Down’s syndrome, who have a certain autonomy, lower life expectancy and a disability that is visibly appropriate for advertising campaigns and jobs in companies that want to make a display of their solidarity, autistic people can have a perfectly normal appearance and live as many years as anyone else. Some of my favorite artists have ended up committing suicide or dying young. That doesn’t enter into my plans: first of all, what would happen to my brother in the future if I weren’t around? That question, in my attempt to compensate for not being a neurosurgeon-genetic-engineer-discoverer-of-the-reasons-for-autism and therefore discoverer-also-of-his-cure, in addition to having a vocation as precarious as artist usually is, has aggravated things. I try to brace my clearly artistic résumé with multiple certified foreign languages, a second undergraduate degree—in Literature, what can you do—and a master’s. This feeling of added responsibility is something that also happens to those who’ve lost a brother or sister as children: somehow the awareness that you have an opportunity that someone close to you doesn’t have, means you are haunted by a feeling of not being able to let down your parents, who already have enough to deal with.
All of that, plus the recession of 2008, ended up leading me from jobless desperation to teaching. Teaching secondary school is an activity that causes people to pity you; some hide it better than others. An activity that doesn’t enter into the plans of the samurai existence demanded of the artists’ collective, propelled across continents by grants, exchanges, artists’ residencies, etc. And if they do teach, it’s as a “guest artist” leading a workshop, usually funded by municipal cultural departments, because the administration assumes that there aren’t artists among the teachers but rather that they swoop in from the supposedly glamorous art world in order to empower the lumpen with Marxism, postcolonial thought and queer theory. I envy that life. Yes; for the explorations, places and people that I miss out on. I also imagine a reality in which before each teacher enters the classroom at the start of the year, a bigwig sent from the Department of Culture would introduce him or her to their future students with reverence:
“Allow me to introduce X, whose teaching practice is situated between performance, conference, and activism. X has a long creative trajectory, having presented 875 variations on the same subject—Mathematics—in 75 different situations: first thing in the morning and at dusk, before students from urban centers, from small towns, and at risk of marginalization. Let’s welcome X with a warm round of applause!”
Delusions aside, there is an important element necessary for any creative activity: a constraint. So many of us have to get up at seven. The best part is that there are a lot more people here and that staves off our spleen. Perhaps that’s counterproductive if you aspire to have an international career, but if what you aspire to is focus and being able to work without creating dependencies (my highest aspiration right now), it’s a great advantage. These are some of my current limits: I get up at 6:45 a.m., work until 2 p.m., and by 3 p.m. I’m home and can do whatever I want.