This blog fell
off the radar for a good reason.
Major
shifts, changes, reprocessing of data. Painful as hell. Worth it? Yes. YES. A
thousand times YES.
I never got
that “an artist’s birth by fire” crap before. I thought I got it, but I didn’t.
I thought it meant you went through a lot of painful shit and eventually just
started slinging your pain into a canvas or a camera shutter or a block of
words or whatever medium grabbed you, and the product was art because it was wrought from a different hand than the norm,
from a bottomless well of terrible emotion instead of an intellect. And the difference was what made it art. Made it
stand out of the background noise of living.
Bullshit.
The fire that
births an artist is not the pain. The fire is the healing of the pain. The fire
is the consolidation of past experience into a present that’s acceptable and a
base from which to move forward. The fire is the part where you look around at
the shattered mess inside your head and decide it’s time to start putting it
together. And to do that you have to let someone else see in there. You let them reach their hand into the very deepest
ache of your hurt, and sift through the ash of your mistakes, and guide you
into standing upright. You let yourself be shown where the fissures are. You begin
to fix them. You learn what matters. What doesn’t. You have to let go of what doesn’t
matter, no matter how much you want it to matter. You have to take a solid,
honest, uncompromising look at the mistakes you’ve made, at what circumstances
threw you to the ground in the first place. You have to give yourself credit
for what you’ve lived through and you have to give yourself hell for failing
and you have to throw all that on the scale of justice and hope to God it evens
out.
So now the
fire burns away the unessential. The fire purifies. The fire rights the wrong.
I have been
able to create what I’ve been creating, what I’m still creating, because of
where I’ve been. I have to say this to myself as clearly as I can because it is
the most important concept I’ve gotten during this time of change: IT’S ONLY
WASTED PAIN IF YOU DON’T LEARN FROM IT.
It doesn’t
matter what happens with this anymore. The drive to make the product perfect,
to make it right, pulls me forward,
but the product itself has lost importance. I learn by doing.
I am
learning, I am learning, I am learning. I learn. Forever, I learn. New neural
connections blossom in my skull. I begin to see the paths that connect, to see
with clarity what perfection we strive for, to understand the place we spend
our lives is in the effort. I understand how little I understand. The humbling
is empowering. The base from which I step into the future.
Tomorrow,
this will be torn down again.
The day
after that, I’ll begin again to build it back up.
Reading things like this make me wonder at destiny & how you managed to find a shithead like me through this chaotic universe. All I have to say is that I'm really thankful to have an opportunity to be in this part of your world. You have an excellent way of putting some sincerely complex shit into words that make me say, "Yes. YES. YESSSS! THAT'S EXACTLY IT!". Good for you. Good for YOU.
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