Words I Write

I’ve been questioning a lot of things lately; myself, my poor planning, my currently unfulfilling job, my life choices, my student loan options. I have plenty of questions and anxieties but I’m a little short on answers. So I turned to some bigger questions, about the nature of questions themselves.

Why do we ask questions? Is it purely curiosity? A desire to gain knowledge? Or maybe we want to better understand and thus control the world around us. We ask, therefore we are. We learn and so we grow. We ask questions because we seek answers and sometimes getting an answer is as simple as bothering to ask.

But back to the title of this post. What, you may ask, is my question of the day? Well, dear reader, it is a question that has been plaguing me for some time now:

“If not now, when?”

This particular question has been a veritable thorn in my side as I sit and stare at a screen for the majority of my free time and stand and stare at one during lulls at work. It constantly looks down its nose at me and asks in a patronizing voice what exactly is it that I’m waiting for, an invitation?  But it has a painfully valid point. Why do I keep putting off doing all the new, fun, interesting, challenging things I know I want to do? Is it just laziness that keeps me from “living my life to the fullest” or is the cause a more worrisome one: fear? Am I afraid of changing? Or changing too fast? Where I am now sucks, but it’s a comfortable sort of unpleasant, a familiar discomfort, if you will. Perhaps what I’m really scared of is that if I change things too much, too quickly, I’ll end up worse off than I am now. I’ll be presented with pain, and heartbreak, and suffering. But is a life of minor aches really any better than a world of pain? Is putting off something I might deeply love really worth it in the off chance that I find out I hate it? Living in fear is not really living at all, and I definitely want to live.

So there’s this speech that Neil Gaiman gave to the Philadelphia University of the Arts graduating class of 2012 that my sister is totally obsessed with. He is an amazingly creative man who has accomplished so much and he has fantastic words of wisdom for creative people about to go out into the ‘real world’. One of the pieces of advice he gives that really stuck with me is this:

“The one thing you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. The moment that you feel that just possibly you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself; that’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.”

Walking down the street naked. That’s what I’m doing. And I’m terrified. No one tells you when you start out that being a good artist means baring your soul, exposing deep, dark, painful and delicate parts of yourself in order to create beautiful things. My beautiful things are fragile and I’m very protective of them, which can be seen as a weakness in the industry. My ideas are my babies and what kind of shakespearean mother enjoys letting her beloved children die? And yet, with each success or failure I grow and deepen as a person, I mature as an artist, and I find new pieces of my puzzle to explore. Today I’m the mother figure, tomorrow I’m the hero or maybe the villain, I play all the characters in the stories I weave and I find truth in each new role. Archetypes are a good place to start, but character is about so much more.

I was talking to a fellow creative recently about a campaign he was struggling with and I likened his efforts coming up with fresh ideas to “squeezing a dry sponge.” I meant no insult to him and he fully agreed that I had made an apt analogy. Creativity is a battle sometimes. It gets frustrating when your sponge dries up. You feel stuck. Your brain feels like a barren desert, empty of ideas, and full of sand. It sucks.

I currently have a different problem to grapple with though, my ‘stuck’ is a result of a sudden lack of a creative outlet which leaves me understimulated and antsy. My sponge is so oversaturated that I’m constantly sitting in a metaphorical puddle of my own unused creative juices that leaves me soggy, groggy, and grouchy when I consistently fail to quiet my imagination enough to get some sleep at night.

In order to remedy both of these issues, we agreed to meet up again to bounce ideas off each other and share sponges, as it were. I get an outlet to release some of my creative energy and he gets some inspiration and a fresh perspective on his projects. Sounds like a solid partnership to me.

I crave change.

Most of the world has a bad case of neophobia-they fear change-but me, I live for it. I want to always be open to new adventures, new places, new experiences. Monotony is worse than chaos to me. I say it all the time: I’d rather be busy than bored. Calling me a creature of habit is like calling King Kong a cute little chimp, it’s so backwards it must be a joke.

My greatest fear in life is getting stuck. I don’t fear death or pain or loneliness, I fear never doing anything. I don’t want to look back and wonder where the time went, because I struggle with that. I get caught up in worrying about the future. I worry about not knowing what I want to do, not having a plan. I worry about never accomplishing anything worth doing, never going places worth visiting, never saying or writing anything worth reading or quoting or even remembering.  I want to matter, call me selfish or arrogant or even foolish but I want to make an impact. I want to leave the world better than I found it, I want to make a difference. I can do all the writing in the world, but how will I make them want to read it?

Someone once asked me what I thought the meaning of life is, and as far as I’m concerned, we are here to make and appreciate beauty. Whether that beauty is sinfully delicious desserts, a masterpiece painting, the best blowout, the perfect cat-eye, an epic novel, an ice sculpture, a book of poetry, a complex and elegant perfume, the best-balanced cocktail, or even a wonderful scary brand new human being; the fact of the matter is beauty is everywhere, we create it all the time, and it’s also our job to see it and appreciate it. Humanity is beauty. Sometimes that beauty is cruel, sometimes it is extinguished, but it is constantly being rediscovered and reborn in every human imagination. We need change because beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but how will we know beauty if we never open up and behold it?

True love is out there, so is the perfect cupcake; all you have to do is be brave enough to go looking for it.

Books. Movies. TV shows. Our cultural reality is overrun with the made-up worlds of disney princesses, young wizards, lovable ogres, hobbits, even hyper-dramatic versions of other people’s lives that we like to call reality TV. Basically, we like playing pretend. We never grow out of the desire to lose ourselves in something besides our own (often unfulfilling) lives. And while we ‘grow up’ and move away from our own imaginary worlds and into those found in novels, plays, and tv dramas; we never really stop wanting them.

Books are often called an escape, and we often get so involved with the fabricated reality of movies, plays, and tv shows that we actually become emotionally invested. “Fangirling” it’s called, when someone develops an almost unhealthy obsession for a show, famous person, whatever. And it’s becoming more acceptable. Not to say that marketers ever had a problem. A ridiculously dedicated fan-base is something every tv writer, movie producer, and band manager dreams of; that’s where the money comes from. But why is it more okay to be a fanatic now than it was say, twenty years ago? I read a quote some time ago in an article about a Philip K. Dick book and although it was an analysis of the world in the novel, it holds eerily true of society today, especially my generation’s outlook: “the tedium of existence forces us toward ‘fun’; fun becomes the basis of our faith”. That’s what we’re doing, really, we’re so bored and unhappy with our own mediocre reality that we become consumed by a made up reality that we like better. We get so involved we start dressing up like its characters, writing our own stories to change the plot and matchmake our favorite characters, we consume (most often conspicuously by live tweeting etc) every new development, whether that means scheduling your week around a new episode or driving twelve hours to see THEM in concert.

I can’t help but wonder if we are becoming okay with “unhealthy” obsessions the same way we have become comfortable with unhealthy diet, unhealthy sleeping habits, and unhealthy lifestyles. We are a culture of extremes and indulgence. The extremist ‘All-or-Nothing’ mentality that has become equated with driven and successful people is a scary departure from true motivation. Fear of failure is not motivation to succeed any more than fear of death is motivation to live life to the fullest. Fear of death is what leads people to become scared to use power tools, or ride in cars; even become recluses, scared to ever leave the house. Fear of failure is what causes increasingly higher numbers of seemingly happy students at great colleges to spiral into depression and suicidal behaviors under the weight of crippling  pressure to succeed. And then the media calls it ‘tragic’. Their friends are always shocked because they ‘seemed so happy’. Their parents and professors  are baffled because they were ‘doing so well in school’. But I know what it’s like to get trapped by fear. Irrational thoughts keep you up at night. Isolation (real or imagined) drives people to desperation. And when something bad inevitably happens, ‘they weren’t well’, something was terribly wrong, if only they had sought help. And all the while society stigmatizes mental imbalances and illnesses, shuns those who profess a need for help, people who can’t just ‘deal with it’ by themselves.

We say the only things we are allowed to feel are displeasure, lust, envy, pride, greed, wrath, sloth, gluttony. Unhappiness is the norm. Complaining is encouraged, we call it ‘ranting’ instead of whining, and it’s perfectly acceptable to do so without ever attempting to find solutions to the things that bother you enough to complain about. We indulge in our food, our hubris, our hatred, our lust, especially our love of money, any vice is considered sexy and makes the perpetrator more complex and desirable, ‘passionate’ even.

The fad motto YOLO (You Only Live Once) adopted by teens around the world is a sad example of the dangerous levels of indulgence that our culture encourages. It is hailed as an excuse to behave badly, make poor choices, and bow out of accountability. It is none of those things. It should be a reminder of our mortality. If it was a self reflection akin to asking which you would regret more: doing this thing or missing the opportunity to, then maybe we would have less overdoses at concerts and teen pregnancies. Maybe we would have more kids speaking out, sharing ideas, and boldly striving to change the world.

Wouldn’t that be a nice world. Sounds like aspirational fiction to me.

I sometimes need to remind myself that I don’t totally suck. There are days were I feel like I don’t have any good ideas, skills, or things worth saying and those are the days when I go back to the things that inspire me. I find myself and remember the reason I decided to do this stuff in the first place. I love art even when it’s an infuriating, elusive, and persnickety mistress.

And I do art for myself, because when I try to do it for other people, it actually does start to suck. I have to listen to my own creative voice and not let it get drowned out by annoyingly old-fashioned professors, critical classmates, or my own self doubt. It’s my job to curate my own creativity, and I shouldn’t be trying to pander to everyone else’s preferences. I want to make things I’ll be proud of and I’m never going to make anything half-decent trying to kiss up to someone else’s tastes and preferences. On that self-motivating note, I’ll conclude by posting something I’m maybe almost proud of, a first from this semester’s projects.

I watched an amazing TED talk the other day about achieving your childhood dreams and there are so many things that this man, Randy Pausch, said that empower me. It’s just such a wonderful talk, I’m awestruck by everything that he accomplished and the apparent ease with which he accepts his death. He achieved all of his own dreams and there was one quote, one nugget that inspired me to do the hard things, to not give up on the things I want. He said that brick walls are there to remind us how much we want things. The obstacles aren’t there to shut us down, they exist to deter the people who don’t want it enough. The key to getting what you want isn’t being the luckiest or the wealthiest or even the best qualified, you have to try the hardest.

I saw this kind of determination in my sister when she stopped at nothing trying study abroad in Italy over the summer. She didn’t give up or stop trying when she faced challenges like financing and she eventually got what she wanted, along with all of the bizarre, funny, fantastic stories that one accumulates living in a foreign country for two months. She took day trips to Venice, shopped at the local farmers’ markets, lived in Florence, went to wineries in the countryside for tastings, visited Italian beaches, and even went cliff diving. Because she wanted it badly enough.

Motivation like that is something I really struggle with personally. I often find myself having a hard time living up to my aspirations or potential because I just lose steam. I want that inner drive to be successful and productive but I just slog along, doing the bare minimum. I do have the occasional burst of creative, productive energy but it tends to happen at inopportune times when I’m required to do other tasks or materials aren’t available or whatever and it’s frustrating. I have all these great ideas swirling around and when one bubbles up to the surface I never seem to be close enough to a pen and paper to grab it before it’s gone again. I want to have drive and inspiration on demand, as impossible as I know that is. So where does that leave me? Spinning my figurative tires, mostly. I’m stuck. I want things but I almost feel as though I don’t deserve anything great because I don’t want it enough. It’s like…I’ve been afraid to want something that badly for so long, that now I’ve forgotten how to crave anything. After one too many let downs, I stopped letting myself want anything that I had a possibility of not getting it so now I can’t “dream big”. I need to stop aiming for the easy targets and start jumping off cliffs.

A few things I’ve been thinking about post-posts:
So I shared the link for this blog on Facebook, which is something that both thrills and terrifies me to no end, and I got a few interesting comments (which is pretty ironic after getting so few comments during the semester). After reading every post (D:) my grandfather asked with much confusion if I had actually written them all, and if so, why was this the first time he was seeing them? I assured him that yes, I had written them all, and said I just hadn’t chosen to share them before now. He then explained his confusion to me. At some point along the way, since I wasn’t getting much feedback from teachers or classmates, I started self-critiquing my own work. Apparently this habit led to an inner dialogue that made some of my posts seem a little schizophrenic, or at the very least like two different people were involved in the process. I assured him that was not the case, I had simply begun taking the time to step away from my work and judge it the way I knew the teachers would. This clarity made it obvious to myself when I was doing quality work and when I wasn’t. I made my efforts transparent and called myself out when my stuff sucked, since no one else would.

I also found myself actually treating this as something of an actual blog, putting some of myself into each post and trying to gain something out of my process every time. I never saw these as work, they were more like working out. Some days working out sucks, other days it’s super fun, but in the end every work out is valuable in getting you in better shape. So even the posts that were rushed, or totally sucked, or the first few (that I did totally wrong and never went back to fix), all helped me gain something. I’m a better judge of my own work now. I know what to do when I’m stuck creatively. I know not to be afraid of the weird ideas. I can easily find my voice and write out my ideas coherently and eloquently. And I have this to come back to. I know that sometimes I can say incredibly wise and insightful things and then forget about them entirely so looking back can be hugely beneficial. Plus I can continue using this as a tool to funnel my creativity. That’s kind of what the directives did for me. Instead of a crazy chaotic waterfall, the directives turned my thought patterns into a series of pipelines. In the long run, being able to channel my efforts like that is priceless, forever saving me time and energy. So what I’m saying is thank you. Even though I won’t get the grade that I had hoped for back in September, the things I’ve learned in this class are much more valuable than my GPA.

So this is it. This is the beginning of the happily ever after. Now what? I wonder what I’ll do with myself when I don’t have posts to worry about and rehash all the time. How will I disperse all my creative build up now that I don’t have a mandatory means of channeling it? I guess I just have to do what I’ve been doing all along in this class: make it up as I go.

I am kind of sad about being a couple posts shy of 54 but I never really liked that number anyway, it isn’t easily divisible.

So is this really the end? Who knows? Maybe I’ll keep posting; here or somewhere else, now that I’ve (sort of almost) gotten into the habit.

Do I have any regrets? Bet your butt I do. I regret not working harder on some of these posts. I regret putting them off for so long. I regret not trying all of the really crazy ideas I had because they scared me. There were things I wanted to try but didn’t. Efforts I could’ve made but chose not to. I wanted to do a post drunk. I wanted to survey strangers. I wanted to make and eat something related to VW and make a post about it. I wanted to make better art and work harder on the art I made that I didn’t like. I wish I’d done those things.

This one is called “regrets”:
(Powerful imagery of the beginning of Volkswagen.)
“Do we regret anything? Yes.
Is there something we think we could’ve done better? There’s always room for improvement.
Did we try as hard as we could all the time, every time? Yes.

Everyone has regrets, the key is not letting them define you. Dirty secrets, a dark past, complicated circumstances that are hard to explain; we get it. No one likes to talk about our history, but the important thing is that we rose above it. It’s still there; it’s never going away, but it doesn’t have to be the end of the story, in fact, it’s just the beginning. It isn’t the beginning we would have liked, but you don’t always get to choose. Now is about moving on and growing from past regrets.”

I like that this touches on some powerful undertones that no one ever really thinks about when it comes to VW. I dunno, maybe it’s kind of dark for a last post, but I see it as a demonstration of hope. The past does not define the present, it doesn’t have to repeat itself, and we can refuse to let it shape who we are now even when we can’t change who we’ve been. I see that as about as hopeful as it gets.

I finished off the thanksgiving leftovers for lunch today and it got me thinking about other kinds of leftovers. Like for these posts. I have index cards and sticky notes and notebook pages full of half-fledged ideas that I’m never going to do anything with so what do I do with those? I could congregate them into a final post of word vomit but I don’t feel like that’s very useful. I want to go out with a BANG not with a barf. So instead I’ll focus on leftovers when it comes to VW. Creature Feature! (Yeah, no clue why that’s where my mind went with that.)

Deep in the icy heart of Germany, there once was a being. A mishmash made entirely of cast off parts of old cars, the creature lurked in junkyards and back lots, abandoned parks and empty warehouses. It lived a lonely, solitary life, afraid of what the world would think if anyone ever saw its ugly face. “Lemon!” the neighborhood kids would yell at it. They always said that. And they threw sticks and rocks. The creature avoided the children, hid from them. It watched the other cars sometimes, through fences and windows. The creature wished to be like those cars, shiny and beautiful, but it was ugly and rusty instead. But one day an angel appeared, or at least what the creature thought was an angel. Surely no car it had ever seen before had been so beautiful. The angel car was not afraid of it, but approached it and then guided it out of the warehouse. The creature followed willingly. It would have followed that car anyway. It did not speak, but the creature saw a circle with upside down triangles in it on the car’s hood. The creature wondered about that. It thought about how similar that little circle was to the rusty broken one on its own hood. Eventually the angel car stopped at a large service station and invited the creature to go in. As soon as it entered the darkened garage, everything went black. The next thing it knew the creature was back outside of the service station. But something was different. the creature was a creature no longer but an antique, fully functional, and downright elegant car. That’s the beauty of lasting quality engines, and fully interchangeable parts.

Enduring value, but that’s about it. Weirdness. Kinda fun though.