What We Love

It doesn’t make a lick of sense. Why is prioritizing what we love so difficult to do? Normal people don’t seem to have a problem with it: if they love cooking, they’ll go to the grocery store; if they love working out, they’ve got a gym membership (and they actually use it). So why is it that any vein of artist will struggle in such an incomprehensible way? I’m not talking about the “I’ll settle for a Lean Cuisine tonight” or a “I had to skip leg-day this week”. I mean the months-long hiatus we’ll take from engaging in an activity that makes us more human. 

It’s the mechanical nature of routine, I suppose. The “block out a chunk of time for yourself to write” doesn’t come as naturally as hitting the gym after work from 6-8pm. Creating your art into a routine seems to strip the humanity away from it – routines are for getting homework done, remembering to eat, doing taxes, picking up the hypothetical kids that you do not have from soccer practice. It’s the act of prioritizing those routines above what you so frivolously care about – something that makes you happy.

My last trimester of college earlier this year included two art classes. The vague prompts and chunks of class time were what made me produce art that I otherwise wouldn’t have on my own. It made painting and drawing routines, but I don’t consider those works any less of artwork just because someone else expected me to make them.

I think, at least for me, it has to do with knowing that someone else expects me to be creative. I have this paradoxical confidence in my art and my abilities, so that when people compliment my art with a “This is gorgeous” I’ll respond with “I know, right?” I’m already very aware that I’m an artist… it’s just that “I know, right?” is easier and nicer to say than, “Finally, you noticed.”

It seems so utterly selfish to create a routine around doing something you love especially when that something is only enjoyed by you. People don’t notice my years of dedication to novels I write… which is probably why I can’t remember the last time I sat down and worked on one. I feels like feeding a black hole – the nag of “What do you have to show for it?” answered by a timid “I like it.” 

What I have to show for it is that writing saved my fucking life, and it continues to every day I turn to it for comfort. I have stronger loyalty to the people in my head whom I met when I was twelve than to most real, living people. These ghosts are always there for me, and I have the luxury of abandoning them, of abandoning myself.

And maybe it’s because that, like long-term friendships, we don’t have to touch base every day to know that we care about one another. It’s not writing for six months, then jumping back into a novel for the sake of NaNoWriMo and picking up just where you left off. For me, it’s the getting started that’s the hardest, and that’s likely the depression gripping its jaws around everything I love. And then the second hardest is the leaving. It’s losing track of time every single time I start clanking away on my keyboard, or sketching then erasing then sketching, or sweeping a canvas and breathing in those definitely-not-good-for-you fumes of oil paints. Then, it’s the ctrl s, the closed Word Document, the blowing off of eraser dust, the faucet running and caking of soap in bristles. It’s like taking a detox program. The thing is, art is a drug I cannot quit. I’ll enjoy the high and stock up when I’ve got the cash, then itch until my next fix.

  Welcome back.

Read the more from Cam Best on Floodmark

Illustration courtesy of Arthropunk