Sitting in the heat on a deliberate day with a sky open as god’s closet; breeze and heat corralling me toward the sweet pocket of calm that’s typically hard to find. I should meet the world in the middle here and bask but
god!
dammit,
if I’m not too busy being fucked off for no good reason.
I read something, alright. I read something good and nourishing. It’s struck me right through with misery.
Increasingly I’m recognising the tendency in myself to struggle against great work rather than simply advocate for it and enjoy it. When someone’s real good at something I ought to be able to bask - but instead I soak the shade, rejecting advocacy for a self-defeating spite.
This feels common in creatives; and frankly I want to talk to you so I can get through to myself.
You’re familiar with the feeling? Engaging in work of your own and then chancing upon that of another, where its immediacy falls into sharp relief against your own tired, trite language? Whilst their work is fluid and fresh and engaging, yours is dribbled down the chin, wretched and queasy?
stop it!
you little ghoul!
By shaking the hand of creative work, you’re entering into a binding contract with self loathing, sure. There will perpetually be better, but relying on that yearning to drive you is a fast path to nihilism. You’re tilling your fields with fertiliser, bud! Great plants will soon grow but you’ll ever seek fresh ground to break after the harvest.
You are not a field, you are a garden!
Allow that garden to be wild and spiny, with its half-burned grass and its weeds and its bees and over there’s a rockery and a path that dips to a bank cluttered with crushed cans and husks of pests and an apple core half-rotten in the grass with its brethren unpicked - that barbecue, neglected, still stings of petrol and rust and misuse and time but you’re to huddle round it like a campfire because those coals may glow onwards despite all the everything around them.
Your friends are here; they see it all as it is, and you see them as they are.
Stop. Take time to bask. That sun shines briefly and it is better enjoyed together.
