Choking out the Written Word
It’s easy to preach something I can naturally do without thought. As an artist, to live is to create art, bad art is as valuable as good art, creativity cures the body, soul, mind, and you don’t have to be a genius about it. I know all of this wisdom in the least wise way- because I hear “art” as image. I’m a natural maker, builder, collector, creator, on the page and the screen. I see complex worlds and can translate them through my hands and yet, with all of this confidence and proficiency, I tell myself I can’t write. Words can flow from these same hands, so who’s to stop me from writing?
I’m no better than the onlooker who sees an artist and wistfully admits they can’t draw a circle. Writing has always been difficult, but I shouldn’t let that stop me from doing it anyway. I got good at art because I had natural inclinations preached by teachers and friends. Had I never practiced, I’d still be drawing like a six year old with potential.
When drawing, I can lose myself in the process and continue on for hours. Writing is a night spent eyes-closed, tucked in, awake. It’s a sluggish, arduous process so exhausting I never even bother rereading the stuff I spout until potentially rediscovering it a year later. It’s so much easier to notice the lack of a written conclusion. An un-rendered image is still an image even if you have to squint to see it. And even then, the blurriness means something.
Even scarier is the idea of writing with a chance of someone reading it. The whole act feels performative to me in an intellectual way rather than aesthetic, which is something I am much more accustomed to. This? This is awful. Plus you can’t even zoom out from the place you were tweaking to see the entire picture. You have to go back through and tediously read every word, embarrassingly, or risk making no sense at all. I’m already bored of writing this piece, whatever I intended to say through it.
It’s important to practice things you don’t feel naturally inclined to, especially later in life. I’m twenty two and I already feel the connections in my brain diminishing… The ones that could somehow juggle calculus, biology, music, history, English, and another language within a six hour day. That’s one reason why I’ll always hold respect for children and teenagers. They have to juggle a lot, despite not liking it. Adulthood allows opportunity for choice and comfort, but it invites self-inflicted limitation. So I will try to write, even if I don’t like it. Try to expand the ways in which I can express my ideas or interests.
This is awful.
I like it enough.
