Photo by: Corey Holms
Writing has a strange allure. It’s a doppelganger, a muse, a mirror, and its value fluctuates every time it’s found and rediscovered. But that’s art. We go through the roller coaster that is expression, finding that the best way to explode onto the page is by letting our sleeves run with spit and tears. It’s not always external, but there’s little to argue against who’s behind the steering at any given time pen touches paper.
And being drawn in doesn’t require being victim.
Take an athlete. Emotions can compel him or her to do great things in the moment, but bursts of emotions are only for the moment. The calm and collected seem to stretch their moments, finding the energy to be a note that can ring as long as the halls allow. Drowning it out is much easier than listening. Loud noises stirred by anger turn emotions to a dying roar, but listening holds the note pure. It harvests the essence of the emotion and develops character, sometimes literally. A writer, or any artist for that matter, manifests that note into something palpable. Throughout its life, a novel is not a moment, but infinite moments. It changes, but it never disappears. The note rings an echoing tuning fork waved across the ear.
I never wrote for myself in the sense that it was therapeutic, I wrote for my ideas. To preserve the moment of a self passed on. As firm a believer I am that ideas are not new and that individuals are just amalgamations of ideas, I find something rich in the sense that these ideas have found me…no…that I have adopted the ideas as my own. I have fostered them, grown them, and I believe in them so much that I feel it necessary to demand the world’s attention toward them. A crazed parent lacking doubt.
But woe in the moments I find doubt. There is nothing like an artist’s self-depreciation. Ever wonder why it is thoughts of suicide so readily creep up and euphoria seems a rareness? I find the longer I sink…the deeper I sink, the more trying it is to break free. But I ride the wave of faith that I will emerge victorious. Every time I break, the euphoria is never expected, and its intensity has been long forgotten. I find it reborn, and refuse to examine it. I’ll dwell on sorrow, but the fleeting moments of greatness are too few to not allow them to take over. What spurns from these moments will later be judged, and the verdict is oftentimes less than favorable. This is the cycle I believe I am not alone in experiencing, and it must be embraced.
Consider this entry an extended hand. We as artists must ride life for what it’s worth, and it’s oftentimes easier to see the bleak. It’s the bleak that demands us to answer “why?” It’s the bleak that inspires thought.
You may experience the world alone, but you are never alone in experiencing it. So far as we are unique, the distance stretches further in our similarities. So long as we are alone, longer still are we together.
I look forward to reading your masterpiece.
— Kyle Jacobson
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