On Becoming an Artist

Well, first off, let me clarify that 'becoming an artist' here has the meaning of 'accepting yourself as an artist'. Owning it, for lack of another way to say it.

Moving on. I realise that this will sound very melodramatic and all that. I don't actually care much. I want melodrama right now, much in the same way that one wants a cupcake.

I look at my 'becoming' an artist much like people might look at becoming a vampire. It's a painful and wonderful process that you notice in spades only after nearly all the life has been sucked out of you. The first step to immortality is death.

The first step is a kind of slow death wherein you're worn down by the life you're trying to live until you find yourself just playing at attempting to seem all right. This step is uncomfortable, to say the least. The encouragement received from friends and family seems hollow, as though made of nothing but fine ash, stuffed full of smoke that will dissipate at the first whisper of a harsh wind. Nothing matters much and while you have the occasional victory, the occasional flash of wondrous purpose, it never lingers. All the world is gray.

The second step is crucial. Something outside of your own head must reawaken something that once existed in you. This can happen in many ways but for me it was simply the rediscovery of NaNoWriMo. Remembering a time when the fire of artistic purpose was not some distant candle but an internal drive, a steam engine that forced my hands and my head into action and feeling the gears begin to turn in my head again was what ultimately brought me out of this state of artistic death.

Step three is simply to look with your artist's eyes. You begin to see the world in colours again and they build, hue upon hue, until all the world's ablaze. And day does not link to day in a finite choke chain which keeps you tethered to a small back corner of a world you now see in all it's awful glory, but rather there is night folding into night above an endless, darkened sea.

And then your struggles make perfect sense. And you move on. And you create.