I still have the conception that I can do it better, faster, on time, -- I want the money—I like the work—and when I confront it- why am I so successful and creative and prolific? Loneliness and boredom. The world has never made sense to me and the only time I feel truly captivated by life is when imagining, when creating, when manipulating it to the edge of the furthest part of the fence and still struggling to smash my giant adult hand through the chicken wire to grasp the purest, untainted, ideas on the other side.
Now, I’m experiencing something I’ve never had the pleasure of having in my life, popularity. My personality, a sum of quirks that have always been a burden to me in a conventional society, are suddenly an asset. I’m rewarded for being weird, innovative, and unwavering in my expectation of how people should treat each other. I’ve never let my friends or lovers or family off the hook, and it pains me that countless interactions I observe everyday are mildly disingenuous reproductions or imitations of what it really should meant to be part of each others’ lives, which is accountable, respectful, authentic, and mutually beneficial.
In an honest account of things, I don’t think I’m that interesting of a person. When left to my lonesome, my inherent desire to be productive is all that I have. I might always be doing something, but it maybe isn’t so much a compulsion that comes from joy as much as one of digesting chaos. I make things to attempt to demystify the universe, and I’m constantly exploring that… or entertaining myself… but it usually isn’t clear to me which. I make gifts to see people smile, design to make money, find value in my existence because maybe it’s changing young people’s lives, take pictures of myself to remember I was never a fixed point or that I was unchanging. My relationship to creation is the most difficult and purest relationship I have, and it came from seeing destruction in all other parts of my life- that maybe if I could figure out how something is made, if I could make it from beginning to end, that it would make everything else a little bit easier to deconstruct and make sense of. The veil of reality is thin- I’ve just given myself permission, albeit, occasionally, to listen to my impulses and act on them, which happen to be of the creative variety- and that’s really all it is. What I haven’t learned is how to be okay without control, or be truly vulnerable, I’ve written things in the past which when I reread are such sob stories, prayers kind of, and I got part of my wish to become a hardened, unwaveringly productive machine, but it just distracts from the chaos, it doesn’t really put it into order.
What you spend today doing is all that really matters. And usually I think it might be best if I spent my time making something beautiful, especially with dwindling attention spans and the ever-increasing speed at which it’s possible to ‘accomplish’ something. But, eventually it feels as if those accomplishments are crammed so closely side by side into a narrow channel that their almost indistinguishable from doing nothing at all.
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