What to call myself

I wonder how long I will stay in this state, in this in between of “work” but no “product.” Is the answer to shift my level of quality, to lower my bar? I envy the people who release their work, even if I don’t like it, even if I question the motive. The small voice inside me tells me that they have something, real and existing, and that its better than nothing. What do you have, it asks me. What type of legacy do you have to show? I feel like I disrespect myself when I think like that. But it’s true, I have developed an innate level of quality that I grade my work on. I am my own gatekeeper, insisting I am not ready, that it can be better, to keep trying. I need more hours, I say. I need more time to get better. It’s an awful, beautiful thing. But it keeps me in endless loops for years, practicing, not quite there yet. I can find patience but I can only take so much. When will I release my work? Will it be soon? Will it be in this lifetime? Will it ever happen at all? Every day is the suffocating ask of this question; the wind hitting my face unbothered, unaffected by my suffering, as I sit in its silence and agony only to return back to work. I am growing frustrated. I am growing more agitated. I have no solid reasons to continue with no clear guarantee for compensation or reward. And yet I choose to continue. Every day.

Its humbling to identify how much of my life before creating was validation. And how much I miss the sunshine there. Its company.

I’ve become incredibly selfish. I only want to learn what I want to learn. I do not have time for certifications, graphs, abilities I don’t care about. I do not have time for using my “high potential” in a place I don’t think it deserves. When I am told I have this high potential I can’t help but think of vampire teeth, sucking me dry, as if just because a person has this skill, it should obviously be depleted in a corporate world. It should obviously be used, obliterated. Any other choice is not only unwelcomed, but immature. Careless, as if you are throwing it away. I find myself resource guarding, like a hurt dog, these few things I have left. These few things I find hope in.

I remind myself that I am not alone in these feelings. It has taught me what the world looks like without a constant applause, and all the heartache that lives there. The triumph. The passion. It has made me realize how stupid income brackets are, our ages, our backgrounds and biographies, how invisible the lines are that separate us in emotion and desire. But it also worries me and creates an anxiety I have never felt before, to know that collectively this is the experience. This is what lies beyond the welcome mat. That most of us exist in an ongoing stage of grief, never-ending, unsure if anything will ever put the pieces together in a recognizable way, with all of us trying to find it, wondering around like lost cattle on a field.

I envy the concrete examples of progress. I envy careers I have no interest in, no heart to pursue, purely for the gold plaques they get to hang along their wall. I envy physical things, like rooms and plants, because they can visually offer change and growth, with distinct pillars of progress my creative endeavors could never supply. I envy all of these tangible things that feel hard to see in my creative space, where my interpretation of good or bad is dynamic and moody. Where one day I am focused, the other in a debilitating brain fog. Where one moment I know indefinitely that this is where I ought to be, and the next I am on the floor, staring at what never happened, aching for sun.

What’s worse is I feel embarrassed to call myself an artist, a creator, a writer, because what have I created? What have I released out into the world? The word created is past tense; it’s been done. It’s been executed. Then there’s creative itself, with its motion, an ongoing oblivion of neuropathways colliding, digesting, in the hopes of finalizing something. It becomes uncomfortable to recognize that the ultimate goal is to be a creator, an action, when so much of the work before that is a dense mystery, sometimes with an acceleration, sometimes just floating in space. You could have years, thousands of days, strung together on a laundry line with deliberate dedication and work and have them all crumble at your feet, disintegrating, wondering if it even helped you at all. It appears that there is no value in the process itself. The onlooker only cares about its outcome, its enjoyment, nostalgia, the emotions it made them feel. The onlooker only says great job when it has something to judge. It doesn’t acknowledge uncounted hours. It doesn’t look at what time you clocked in. The medals that sit patiently in their cases only hug the necks of those who manifested a tangible existence. Of people who expelled, not perfected. I try not to think about the many lost hours I wasted absorbing a neighborhood, a conversation, a crisp fall day, that sit dormant within me for an unknowing end. All these experiences my subconscious deemed impactful and my conscious deemed mundane. And the foolish hope of telling myself they amounted to something, with the little voice within me asking, where? What? Point to it for me? And I can’t find enough evidence to form the syllables on my mouth.  

Maybe the depletion of validation is not lost in these passages, which in its core seek validation, because why else would it have been created? Why else would it be deemed to share? Maybe all works of art, no matter how selfless or egoless they are, have validation in its center. Human acceptance in its crust. It’s strange to think that so much of art is an independent filtration that ultimately depends on the connection to the masses. That its prosperity, despite being harvest for lifetimes or centuries by limited souls, must be validated and cherished in the end. It must be authentic but universal. Very “you” but also very “we.”

Pain is when you realize what you want most in the world is devoured everyday by what needs to be done. It’s the balance of dream and practicality, where dream inevitably takes the back seat, moving further and further away until its wound tight, rag-mouthed, in the back of a trunk. And when you tell someone in a panic what you should do with this breathing thing, on its last breath, they shrug and show you all the casted bodies of dreams they took care of many years ago. Because that was the right thing to do. The intelligent one. Pain comes with the bleak awareness of how with each passing day you are not creating, you lose a creative spark within you. You lose something you never saw, will never remember. A name lost and formless. That as you consume the music of someone else’s work on your way to your job, it’s a time and space that will never be back again. It reminds you of what you’re not doing, creating art. It becomes an act of self-sabotage in this way, where any consumption of art is a dark reminder of your lacking. Your frostbite. That this condition you are in, with its own pulses and auras, will never be able to express itself. It will never be able to speak. And tomorrow you are forced to do it again, and again, preferably for the next fifty years, with the expectation that you will not only do so with a smile across your face but with an immense gratitude, for all of the vitality it brought you. All of the many ways it let you live your life, absorb your hobbies. All of the ways it let you create.

I have no advice to offer. I only wonder how long I will stay in this space, if I will ever find an escape at all. It continues to be a struggle to look at myself with respect, to full-heartedly agree I am a creative, when so much is tied to outcome. Possession. You would think after all this suffering and isolation I would walk away, hands up in the air. But I can’t find myself to do that. It would hurt even more. Some may call this a calling. But it’s another thing I can’t point to or name, that feels so intertwined with stubbornness and delusion. So intertwined with myself.

As disheartening as it is, I know I am probably not alone. I can feel it in the eyes that dance across me, searching for prosperous dreams sitting in the passenger seat, finding solace in a woman who found the time to write on a Sunday morning.

In this space where we discover that creative redemption, heroically, lives in the lost lens of aching spirits.