Is it possible to both create meaningfully and exist purposefully?
I am incredibly worried that mediocrity is beguiling me into believing I’m a good writer. It’s similar to the suspicion I get when my Mother tells me I am beautiful, but only does so because she has to, because she loves me. I often think about how many of the people I know have been told they were smart, or special, or interesting enough to establish themselves as a bastion of personality in their spheres. The “fake it till you make it” ideal I see reflected in everyone around me is confusing; have you made it though? When did you make it? What was the tipping point between faking and making? On the flip side of this, if the success you fabricate is transparent your ego is mistaken for deception and a deliberate wound to the integrity of creation. This is our generation’s Catch-22; Self promotion is both inherently shameful and self-absorbed, but apparently the only way to get ahead in the millenial world.
Over the two years I’ve been working full time in admin I have developed a strange affliction where I lament over time and energy lost to the work day and its demands that could have otherwise been spent on writing, or reading, or learning something outside of parking spreadsheets and emailing invoices. It hits 2:00PM and (about an hour after my second coffee) I become increasingly anxious that I am wasting away performing labour that has literally zero value to me. Whenever I get a spare moment at work I try and write, but the environment I am in is never conducive to free flowing thought and I feel stunted, holding a bandaid over the wound until I get home. Once home, I’m too tired to concentrate on anything but television or food, and the cycle lays quietly dormant until the next uneventful weekday. This, after all, is how the system operates — bleed the workers dry of spiritual wealth so they search for it in material goods and the idolisation of unaffected happiness. The futility builds, I become depressed, and I call it a quarter-life crisis.
There is a very bitter feeling of powerlessness involved in denying yourself some sort of creative release as a result of this work-life cycle. The undeserved feelings of guilt torment you and you feel sick with un-recognition; all of this emotional gunk twists in your gut yearning to be shown to someone, anyone. One of the hardest things to do as a proverbial “creative” is allow people to criticize your vulnerability in a public setting. If you do so and people like it, you are rewarded tenfold for your efforts. When these two outcomes — creative release and inflated external validation — meet and tango, the result is an almost perfect cocktail of joy and you pucker with the sweet glace cherry of temporary self-acceptance, but the hangover feels tasteless. The release in the recognition is never as you imagined, and the fruit of your labour becomes an incorporeal ideal. This does not just apply solely to artists — all people need to connect with other people, for our fears and sadness and pleasures be acknowledged on a vaster scale in tiny daily acts. I don’t want to say the creative industries are a giant circle jerk, but no one would deny the arts are in many senses mastubatory. Turns out, a lot of us cannot survive without masturbation.
Transversely as much as people insist that it’s fine just being fine, existing and working through the day, you know underneath it all that this isn’t the reality for you. It’s only fine to do nothing as long as you have SOMETHING up your sleeve. That kind of stasis is never assumed to be permanent. I am better now at resisting comparing myself to others, measuring their success against my own, but my thoughts exist in a vacuum. If others are doing the same thing as me and believing that everyone else has things more worked out or attractive or manageable I will never know, because the need to appear über chill with excess far outweighs the need to be OK with just existing. It’s stronger and less painful for most to keep their mouths shut about their existential battles.
It feels impossible to understand that your output into the world does not equate to your worth when literally everything is engineered to tell you otherwise, even your biological makeup. If output = success, whether that be financial, emotional, physical, even spiritual, your time of rest is only ever an interim. You give out until you cannot give any more, and you die, which I suppose is the ultimate giving up of yourself, the spending of all energies that you were or could be. Capitalism teaches us this — you can holiday, as long as you work for it. This is the paradox of work and stillness — a chicken and the egg situation where one must come before the other but there is no permanent freedom from the cycle.
It is hard to fathom stillness or labour without monetary or social gain. This is why we only fantasize leaving it all — quitting our jobs, living off the land, making peace with never seeing some of the people in our lives ever again. We could all do this, theoretically — if circumstance and ability allow it for you, but when it comes to the doing of it the path proves muddy and our tools to clear it are non-existent. We look at the sunlit path behind a window and refuse to open that window. I want to say that being a creative you have purer intentions — you want to connect with a universal experience, but in the end is it ever good enough? Is what you’re making worth anything if it’s not in a gallery, if it’s not on a stage, if it’s not on a screen?
When these two outcomes — creative release and inflated external validation — meet and tango, the result is an almost perfect cocktail of joy and you pucker with the sweet glace cherry of temporary self-acceptance, but the hangover feels tasteless.
There seems to be a completion of dreams, the pointlessness of goals that seem silly in the face of the end of the world, the supreme human roast. I have thought often recently that now the only true pure act of creation is in preservation, to work in renewable energy or earth restoration. I envision finding a job in these fields (environmental science degree pending) and feeling like I was actualizing my productivity, that it wasn’t me screaming numbers into the ether. Would this restlessness still exist? Is anyone truly content with the nature of their labour?
It sounds philosophical but these ideas manifest in my anxieties constantly. I wish I could scratch this itch by simply writing it out, or cutting something up, or posting something, but I can’t. It’s the methadone of all possible releases, and I tell myself what I made means nothing until it has a by line and tinyURL.
Everything I have written exists inside of me as a rolodex of thought and memory. I think about these words all the time, and they comfort me, even the ones I have not put out into the world, the ones I am only conscious of as they exist in my journal, on my laptop, in my head. If I hadn’t put any of these words into being, I convince myself that they would still exist like flames licking at a door, trying to exit by any means necessary, pushing me forward with purpose. I can’t write or make something and then leave it there to admire — to pull it out of my gut through my belly button and sit it on a mantel, dripping and gooey with birth, finally ready for all to see — my scrutiny is constant and unabashed, and so is everyone else’s. Maybe I would be happier if I trained myself not to care. Maybe I should just quit my job.