the time when art was enough
but it doesn't satiate anymore, this "writerly" fate I once had
When I was a kid, all I did was read about other people. I felt myself bond with characters on the pages and fantasize about the day I would have friends to have adventures with.
I was really lonely and undersocialized. The imaginary friends I had stopped being enough. I wrote letters to my future friends for fun and made up stories about the fantastical. I prayed to Jesus and learned to write down my thoughts, requesting his attention and being delighted if I got sparks of joy back.
My existence was solitary but I learned to dress myself in the fabrics of realms beyond. I dreamt about the day I could touch others in foreign lands with this ability I had to envision worlds that expanded beyond what I had now.
Then reality hit. Over and over again. I learned that you can’t really exist in the world as an adult if you live too much in the fantastical. Because unfortunately, when you grow up, not living in the here and now begets narcissism, disillusionment, and libidinal dysfunction. You get stuck in Peter Pan syndrome, Alice’s Wonderland, waiting your whole life for it to start and realizing you’re wasting it.
You’re tasked with a decision. Either let yourself keep being stunted, or put your pen down and get out in the arena. Let your heart break, sometimes without a single word written about it, and let the privacy of the crevices of your heart fill you without the Greek chorus in your head urging you to track it all.
You learn to stop craving the validation of your audience witnessing it. Because you remember it all, and you learn to integrate it into digestible, metabolizable truth. You no longer need to speak of it for it to matter.
My body is scarred (including my mind), yet my heart stayed pure. My heart told me to quit writing so much and start making my life a testament to the beauty I wanted to create with my pen.
Instead of slaving at narrativizing the world around me, why not help others directly reinvent who they wanted to be? This became what actually fueled me day in and day out. Rather than detachedly reaching others when they read the books I’d write some day, I decided that I was going to be the kind of person that made all of that magic — all of those beautiful words — all of that ache in my heart — matter in every single action I took. For what’s the point of every tear I’ve cried, every thought I’ve pondered, every city I’ve walked, every thing I’ve accomplished, if I cannot share it with others?
I used to want to be famous so I’d finally feel like my life mattered to others — this was my cope, since I believed I’d never be good enough for anyone to love once they came closer and saw that I’m just some autistic yapper that will annoy you to death talking about the ideas that excite her. Better to consume me in small doses, from the safety of a faceless sheet of paper. You’d never know then how much I bled to produce the ink that lined my words.
But I have learned as I approach my 30th year that making art doesn’t really beget true satisfaction. Writing without being able to use it to connect — without being able to exist in the spaces you create through what you communicate — is ultimately fruitless.
In essence, many writers spend their whole life narrating what’s going on, living while suspended above the moment, fearing if they come back down to Earth that they will find there is no more place for them. They have to stay above it all, being the one who comments, the one who observes, the one who notes — not actually able to be the characters in the story while simultaneously writing it. How sad!
My mom once asked if writing was worth it, being skeptical if it’d be “putting food on the table,” as she said in Mandarin. I think about that often. Can writing “raise me” and “fill my mouth”? Aka can it feed me and satiate me forever? The answer is no. Writing is not the end, but only a means. The ability I have to communicate the words on my heart, was ultimately what led me to the arms of my best friends, my new chosen family, one I couldn’t have built if I hadn’t suffered greatly in the name of art.
But love is the real name of art. I pity those who are still artists who haven’t let themselves feel the warmth of an actual human embrace, because they’re too preoccupied with “being great” to actually be human.
I don’t want to be one of those people anymore. Which is why I’ve tried so hard to break myself out of the prison I’ve always created — one where I fiercely told myself that years of journalism school would save me, that being able to write for others would be what led to my redemption and justified my existence.
That all made the cope and grief more beautiful, but even flowers can’t stay in bloom forever.
Now i’m trying to build things that are tangible, concrete, things that can embrace me. I don’t want to leave a legacy that I cannot see anymore, that I delusionally thought was more “noble” if I can’t see it.
I want to be impacted by the world. Too busy living to stop and document it via words. I want to write as a luxury because I am rich, not write as a necessity because I am poor.
I want to only write as much as I need to hear you say to me- YOU MATTER to me. I want to not have to write to escape pain, but only write now to celebrate new life after all this time.
I wish all my fellow prisoners of words the same fate.
🔥v relatable!!