Good Advices.

In 10+ years of attempting to be creative, to follow even one of the myriad dreams that have plagued me from my pre-teen years, I’ve noticed A Major Theme in advices from creative professionals. You often see this from writers, but I’ve also seen it come plopping unceremoniously out of the mouths of cartoonists, visual artists, playwrights, actors, and musicians. The “advice” is as follows

It isn’t a job! It isn’t a choice! I do it because I HAVE to! You think I enjoy doing this?!?! I don’t! I wake up every day, disappointed that I didn’t die in the night, that I have to start another day of not doing customer service, yet still having enough money to live in a fancy city like New York or London! The only reason anyone would ever do this job is because they have no choice! Because their hearts would not allow them to do anything else!

And then they say The Thing. The Thing I hate more than anything else in the world: 

IF YOU REALLY WANTED TO DO IT, YOU WOULD BE DOING IT ALREADY. IF YOU’RE NOT DOING IT YET, THEN YOU DON’T WANT TO, AND YOU SHOULD FIND SOMETHING ELSE. 

What wondrously insightful advice! It sounds so true, when they put it that way! 

But of course this is not advice. This is a humblebrag. This is a way of saying “I am touched by God! I was forced into this life in spite of the MANY attempts I made to work in customer service. I HATE spending all weekend touring wineries with Mick Jagger and the ghost of Andy Warhol! Oh what I wouldn’t give to spend all day answering emails and sitting in meetings!”

Well I hate to burst everyone’s artier-than-thou bubble, but if this theory (and it IS just a theory) were true, then I would be the first human being in the whole of recorded history who didn’t. Want. To do. Anything!

…because I don't do anything! I must not WANT to be in a relationship, because I don’t date! I must not WANT to write, because I avoid writing even harder than I avoid scrubbing toilets!

And that’s weird, because I live in my body, with my brain, 24/7*. And there is a lot about this brain that I don’t know, mostly because I don’t care to know - the little bit I DO know already keeps me up at night! But I know this much: it really. Really really really really reallyreallyreallyreallyreallyreallyREALLY wants to do all sorts of things. It wants love so hard it is EMBARRASSING. And it wants to express itself in writing! 

The only thing more humiliatingly made-of-want than the brain is the body. Honestly, I cannot even tell you some of the things the body wants! The dark web itself would not host a list of the things this body wants! Sure, it starts with “an ungodly quantity of pizza”, but it goes downhill from there fast.

*Seriously. It is ALL THE TIME with this weird, greasy body and its idiot brain! 

But the truth is, neither the brain nor the body is doing the things it wants to do. Not ever! Well, except maybe the pizza thing. The body definitely does that on a regular basis.

…and IS it because I don’t really want to do these things? Of course it isn’t. And screw the people who want to say it is. Good for them that they’ve never heard of “paralyzing fear”, or “having to hold down a job”, but I’m here to tell you that these are very real things! Fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of embarrassing yourself, fear of being vulnerable, fear of getting fired, fear of being evicted… These are big fears! And I can assure you that they are PLENTY big enough to stop someone from doing things they really truly desperately want to do, more than pretty much anything else in the world, because I’ve conducted these experiments in my own lab!

For a long time, I’ve listened to these artistic luminaries, and let them convince me that if I’m not actively writing, that must mean I don’t REALLY want to write, which of course means I am not A Writer. (They, obviously, are Writers. Which is the position just above “God Almighty” in The Cosmic Order of Things.) 

But I’m in my forties now. Which is…pretty old. And one of the very few things I know for certain in this life is that I absolutely definitely do want to do things. I want to write, but I also want to do a lot of other things I haven’t been doing. And the fact that I’m not constantly scribbling away like my life depended on it does not mean I don’t want to. It’s because of fear. And having Great Writers say shit like that doesn’t really do anything productive, though it does perpetuate the fear, by gaslighting me about whether I even know what I, myself, actually want.

But I know of at least one thing I want. Welcome to my blog.