Do we fear where it will lead?
Although writing has been my lifelong dream, it took nerves of steel for me to submit my first article on Medium. I’m nowhere near where I would like to be on the platform but I’ve challenged myself to write more consistently and I’m feeling more confident that I can contribute to the craft.
Lately I find myself yearning for the day I can stay home and make a living writing. Perhaps one of the reasons we fear exposing our true selves or encountering the inner artist is because creativity seems too risky. I hear the word “artist” and I associate the calling with dramatic, self-inflicted doom such as Judy Garland’s sleeping pills, Billie Holiday’s heroin , Anne Sexton’s final nap in a car filled with carbon monoxide, etc, etc. The number of suffering souls sacrificed on the altar of art by suicidal acts, explains why many of us hesitate to call ourselves artists. It’s safer to just dabble.
No one really expects an amateur to deliver the goods. Creating costs too much, especially if you believe creating only comes by the self-sacrifice technique. Sometimes I struggle to decide to create or to stay blocked because I fear where the creative life will lead me.
Ernest Hemingway says, “Write the truest sentence you know” — this encourages the writer in me. Paint the truest image you can render. Wait all day with camera poised to capture the five-second sliver of light.
In order to be true to a creative work, the artist must journey to the center of the self. Past the conscious keepers of the brain, beyond the barbed wire barricades of the heart, into the trenches of “truth or dare”. You can’t write a true sentence if you don’t trust yourself. You can’t trust yourself without courage.
How do you prepare yourself, all alone, to enter an extraordinary state of mind on an ordinary morning? By showing up, day in and day out. By not judging how it’s going or if it’s going at all. I can’t afford to think about how the work will be received when I’m finished. That’s not my job. I’m learning to surrender the delivery details of my dreams. My job, then, is to just do it. It can’t be published, produced, performed, or purchased, if it doesn’t exist.
What if the fatal wound, the one from which I never recover, is regret?
One day it will take nerves of steel for me to quit my day job and live the artist life. The world courage comes from the French word for the heart, coeur. My heart knows where it’s headed and I’ve decided not to wrestle with it, and collaborate.
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