The Empty Friend in the Room

There’s someone who never leaves you alone if you’re a creative.

They’re always there. Wherever you turn, wherever you look, you’ll find them waiting for you.

If you’re an artist, a writer, a musician…if you’re anyone who has some measure of an inventive idea, then you’re constantly followed by your worst-best friend.

I think you know exactly whom I’m talking about:

Loneliness.

I’ve been noticing the bastard a lot lately. He plops down beside me at the end of the night, after I’ve done everything I’ve needed to do (or haven’t). He talks to me without speaking and summons a sense of loss and disconnection that really eats away at everything. He reminds me that, no matter how much I try, I’m always alone with whatever it is that causes imaginary worlds to flood my perception.

This sounds like crazy talk.

But I think a lot of you understand.

When you create for a living, you ultimately have to confront a difficult truth: no one cares about what you’re making until you’ve made it. No matter how good the idea is, no matter how promising, no one can share your vision until it’s complete. And then you have to confront another truth: everyone is going to bring their own experiences to what you’ve made. So even then, you’ll always be alone with your original vision.

That’s a tough pill to swallow. It creates a sense of separation between you and others—even those close to you. You’re alone with a river of visions and ideas that leaves you stranded on a shore no one else can cross.

At my lowest, I get overwhelmed with a sense of longing, wishing just one person can dream with me. But then I have to remind myself of something: loneliness is an asshole. And, as such, loneliness can make me—and you—and asshole.

Look, it’s a strange and beautiful thing that we do. When it comes down to it, we make things up and hope that people will enjoy what we make up. But we can’t—we cannot—expect others to understand. We can’t force them into our world. We have to accept that the only way we may share the deepest part of ourselves is by creating something, working hard on it, finishing it, and putting it out there.

That’s it. That’s the recipe.

Beyond that, we have to meet people halfway. We have to find other things that move us, other things we care about. Things that we may join others in, so that then we may feel some semblance of connection.

Sports, hobbies, current events, social movements, gaming, I don’t care what it is. In order to be a complete human being, we cannot only be our art.

And, ironically enough, that will make us better artists. We have to be observers, but we also have to be experiencers. We have to participate in the human experience in order to understand it, interpret it, and shape it into something others haven’t thought of.

Most of all, we have to connect. We have to show our loved ones that we care about their lives, their worlds.

Otherwise, we’re left with loneliness.

And loneliness is not a real friend.

The Pressure to Write Fast

You’ve been there.

Staring at your screen. Going over the same line again and again. Watching time dissolve, and feeling like you’ve gotten nothing done.

Except you have. You made the effort to write. You put words down on the page and organized them in a way that will move your work forward.

It’s easy to feel frustrated - I’m feeling that way right now, after a few hours of only getting paragraphs done.

But it’s not about how much you write. It’s about what you write.

What did you work on? How will it impact your reader? How will it open the door for what’s coming next? The context of what you create is far more important than how much you create.

It’s a beautiful thing when you get in the zone. Flow overtakes you, hours rush by in waves, and you are left with a lot of good work.

But it doesn’t always have to be that way. In fact, it can’t. Sometime you have to slog through metal cobwebs to move inches instead of miles.

And that’s okay. Because you showed up.

Keep writing. The next time you do, the dam may break.

Failing Uphill

The elephant in the room is squatting in the house.

It’s something most people don’t like to talk about.

And rightfully so. Who wants to accept that the deck is stacked against them, or that their success is purely based on the fact that they were eased in -

Financially, socially, culturally.

The elephant is named nepotism, and it’s shitting over all of us.

Even those it benefits.

It is what it is. This ain’t a rant against anyone whose career was launched on the wings of some golden mound of poop. We all need to make our way in anyway we can.

This is a reminder to all of us climbing through the mudslide of disadvantage that there’s no other way to do it other than to keep climbing.

I know it’s hard. There are so many days when everything feels heavy. When every stroke on the keyboard is a Herculean task, each finger weighed down by thousand pound finger-traps that are biting you with the force of a rabid crocodiles.

But when that’s going down, you have two options: let them eat you, or make friends with them and ask them how you taste.

The former may be a release, but it also means all your dreams will never come true.

The latter is gonna hurt. It’s gonna hurt like the furnaces of hell. But if you can endure, you’ll come out stronger, better, and more beautiful than you can possibly imagine.

The worst part about all of this is you’re going to fail repeatedly on this climb. You’re going to slip and fall and tumble ass-backwards, sometimes even further down from the place where you started.

It sucks.

No other way around it.

But one day something is gonna hit.

And when that thing does, people are going to see the trail you cut through the avalanche of despair and follow you up it. And then they’ll look through your failed trails and follow those, too, because there’s wisdom is failure. There’s beauty. There’s will and wonder and all that lame shit.

You’ll reach the top and find that amazing view is actually something you created.

I know - some people really don’t deserve what they got. But you can’t change that. All you can change is your fortitude. And you can do it. See that mountain? It’s there for you to climb.