Things

The Stress of Relaxation

So, I've found a way to articulate some things that have been on my mind lately. I didn't want these words to float away in the aether, because what use is coming up with condensed or extended phrases that explain my feelings when I can't use them?

I'm an artistic person. At least, I know I want to be.

For as long as I've been alive, I've been an artist. I am a drawer. I am a writer. I am a singer. I am a pianist. I am a guitarist. And I've always been creating. All my life, I've been trying to pull my inspirations and ideas together and put them on paper. It's what I do. I want to make others happy, I want to make things people will enjoy and I will be proud of.

But unfortunately, I can't. I can't make the beauty I want to, because no matter how much I learn or practice, every image in my head comes out mediocre at best. I paint half developed ideas, I write mediocre plots, I draw the scraggly lines of an uneducated dunce in a botched attempt at getting out the ideas of the universes within me.

And, as terrible as it is, seeing other artists' work so often makes it worse. So often I stumble across other people's amazing work, their designs, portraits, fanart, and I love it. It makes me feel like there is creativity in this world, that there are others with minds desiring what mine does—a new level of art. This positivity is what I try to portray the most in my life.

And yet, as much as I hate it, there's another feeling there. A yearning. A jealousy. Quite frankly, my own mind makes me sick.

I've been properly drawing for four years, and writing and making music for my whole life. Why can't my art look like theirs? Why is my art so terrible? Why don't I know how to make my lines so precise on the first try, why can't I effortlessly pluck the words that so many fledged authors and musicians seem to just have flowing out of their minds, out of their pens and keyboards?

This jealousy, this is what inspires me to create sometimes. And what I create with this jealousy... It's ugly.

So often what I've created with this jealousy is songs, and lyrics. Terrible, terrible lyrics. I'm terrible with stanzas, I'm terrible with rhyme, meter, and anything that makes poetry, poetry. And the ideas, they're ugly too. Botched relationships that I've never even experienced come out in broken stanzas, attempts at the articulation of my own failure at creating are just that—failure.

And so, even in times when I'm relaxed, in my downtime, I think. And I'm reminded. I'm reminded of how inadequate I am, of how I can't create because I just can't force the ideas in my crowded mind out in a way that makes sense. Even this explanation, or I suppose rant is a more fitting word, it's choppy and emotional and utterly, utterly terrible. Nothing but an ugly stream of consciousness.

And because I'm reminded of this inadequacy, I create. I write things I'm not proud of, I create art with my proportions all off. And I know, I know if I liked my work, if I liked myself, I could create.

But I just can't.

And this, I think, isn't even my own problem. I'm convinced that so many artistic people feel this inadequacy, this utter hatred for the fruits of their own labor. We're all told that art is useless compared to so many other occupations. We're told that we're inadequate subconsciously, through the television we watch, the things we're taught at school.

I mean, after all, when has art ever been considered to be a core class, a necessary skill?

Tell me, because for all my memory I can't remember.

But pray excuse my melodramatic, unedited scrawl. I had to let a few things out.