By Michelle Carr
This post is of its own mind. I was totally prepared to write about my family vacation last week. Share my funny insights regarding our trip to Anna Maria Island in Florida and apologize for the small break I took from posting. But today my heart and mind are floating elsewhere and the words seem to have taken over. Sometimes you just need to express your feelings and I guess today is that day.
If you have read any of my other posts, or if you are familiar with me at all, you know I love creativity. I love art in all its forms, whether it be in the form of a drawing, sculpting, writing, music or any of the other multiple avenues. I am always excited to see what gifts people have and am intrigued by the way they use them to express their thoughts and feelings. It is truly awe inspiring to witness someone create something from nothing. This love for creativity is one I’ve had for as long as I can remember. That is why I am so conflicted by these three things that affected me this past week. I witnessed someone trying to practicalize a dreamer, an artist losing his true self to find the spot light, and another amazing artist put down for being mortal.
These things have plagued my head, made my heart heavy and I walked the beach trying to clear them away. And these thoughts and feelings felt the need to be expressed. As anyone who has a gift and the dream of sharing it with the world knows, you are your worst critic. You have a voice inside you that constantly tells you that you are not good enough. That you are crazy to think that what you do is any good and you are insane to think that anyone would even care to see it. No matter how well you succeed in what you are doing, you always carry this voice inside. It is what keeps you pushing yourself to be better, it is what helps you to succeed. So you see as an artist you already have to battle with yourself. And if you are strong enough to push that voice down and set forth anyway you have accomplished a lot. But then you come across those who don’t understand. They are the more practical people, the ones who see dreamers as people walking around with their heads in the clouds. They may even view artists as lazy people. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with being a practical person, the world needs them too. It’s just that when an artist, a dreamer, is taking the uncharted path, often times the practical person will feel the need to set them on the marked one. But what they don’t see is that they are just making it that much harder on the person to succeed in what they love doing. By trying to set them straight, they are forcing the artist to fight not only their own doubts but the doubts that the others feel too. What the practical person doesn’t realize is that if they had perhaps encouraged the person instead, then the artist might’ve succeed beyond their wildest dreams. But often times these battles prove to be too much for the dreamers and they settle in doing whatever practical job comes along. Then sadly, whatever beauty they may have had to share with the world is most likely lost.
I know what this feels like. I know what it is to be the odd one out. It’s not a smooth ride. The battles you fight to follow your dreams won’t be short or easy. But if you are determined, you will make it through. Just don’t give up. I, myself, am now of the mind that when someone tries to convince me that I should be doing something else, I want to prove them wrong. I feel a very strong need to show them what I can do. I take that confusion that I felt from it and shift it into my motivation to prove to them that I can go the different route and succeed. That the unmarked path is only uncharted because no one else has dared to take it before and I will make it through to the end. I use their doubts to fuel my fight to do what I love instead of shy away from it. I have already spent too much of my life doing the things I thought I should and not the things that I love to do. I know I am much happier now. I am happy knowing that somewhere out there I may have helped someone else too.
Then there comes the need to share. I, as a writer, totally understand the need to want to share your gift with others. You want to allow others to partake in whatever wonderfully inspired creation you have made. Share with them the feelings it invoked in you. You do this hoping that others will relate and find the beautiful in it as well. But there are some who feel the need to share their work with as many people as they can as quickly as they can. And some of these people don’t care how they go about doing it. For those it becomes more about the attention and the notoriety, than it does about their gift and what they have actually created. It stops being about the art then and more about what the art can bring them. In doing whatever they must to get the needed attention, they lose themselves. And with this, they also lose touch with the very thing that made their art worthwhile to begin with. I write because I love to. I write to try and make the world a little bit better, brighter. I am very pleased when even one person finds something in my work that makes them happy or something that they can relate to. I don’t understand those who feel the need to put on an act to get themselves noticed. I would much rather let my work speak for itself. If something I have created gets noticed one day and someone thinks that it is worth sharing, then I will be incredibly happy and grateful. But even then, I want it to still be about helping people. Created for those who needed to not feel so alone or someone who may have needed a break from their crazy life and chose me to entertain them. My mission is to always stay true to me and my art.
The other scary aspect I came across this week was the great demand for the art and the price some pay to make others happy. No matter how talented and strong a person is, the fact remains that they are only human. As long as they are on earth they will be human, there is no changing that. Being that, they will get sick, and they will have emergency situations that are not in their control. Then no matter how much they want to please others, they simply can’t. It makes me sad to see how people who claim to love them, turn on them when they don’t get what they want. If something happens and the need to postpone things arrives, I have witnessed some people going absolutely nuts. Some fans seem to think that they deserve whatever it was they were promised. They tend to forget that there are people, actual people behind the magic. People with health to look after and feelings that can be hurt by their rude comments regarding their disappointment. I’m sure the artist already feels terrible for having made the decision that they had to, they don’t need to hear how it upset others. I get that it sucks if something gets cancelled, but one should really move on. I’m sure that whatever it was will get rescheduled, there is no need to make the artist feel like crap about it. I’m sure if they could’ve done whatever was promised, they would have. I would much rather know that the person was okay, then put them through hell just to entertain me.
All in all, I just see these things and they make me take pause. I wonder how anyone could say being an artist is easy. Because even though you love what you do, it doesn’t make it any less uncomplicated. I am challenging myself to things that are so much harder than anything I have ever done before. It can be even harder than then 8-5 job at the office, because it never stops. Art doesn’t stop at a certain time. It doesn’t punch a time clock. It can come to you when you least expect it. It can make you change an entire blog just to get out the words that have been haunting you. It is a mystery, a beautiful gift that should never be discarded, used or abused. The gift of art should be treasured, shared and loved, for without it the world would not be nearly as beautiful as it is.
