Here Is the Truth

by natprance

Here is the truth. You are a terrible artist. You are untalented filth. You need to give up immediately. Quit. Just sell your guitar, burn your canvas, tear up every page you’ve ever written, because you’ll never get anywhere.

You aren’t getting any better. It’s been years, and you aren’t getting any better. Quit. Just stop. Your gut feeling? The feeling that tells you to keep going despite how soul-crushingly hollow any of your efforts always feel? That feeling is wrong. You need to give up and go home. Go back to school and get a job as an accountant. Find a wife or a husband. Settle down with a mid-five figure salary, have kids.

You’ll be happy. I know a lot of people say that that sounds boring, but you’ll be happy. If you keep doing what you’re doing, if you keep writing and painting and dreaming, you will not succeed. I am the bearer of bad news. I am telling you that if you are unhappy, you will be unhappy forever, and if you are happy, you aren’t a real fucking artist. You aren’t a real artist anyway. Your hands are too slow. You fingers shake too much. People cringe at the sound of your voice.

You will never get respect. Nobody will enjoy your art. You will be cold and miserable and alone until the day you die, weeping and wishing you’d done something else. In death, your works will be buried with you and forgotten as the flesh rots from your bones. The maggots will eat your innards along with your name. You are and forever will be nothing.

But you can change that. You can abandon your art. You can do something about it. You can be fulfilled. You can have a family that’s proud of you and kids that love you. You can have friends that you like to sit around and drink beers with, and you can get a little boat that you take on the river when it’s sunny in July. You will never want for food or shelter. You will never have another sleepless night where the sheer terror of uncertainty smothers you and snakes its way into your lungs. You will be happy.

And if you know all that and you still won’t stop, then you’re an artist. If you will take that misery and hopelessness and terror and you make peace with your sadness and loneliness and hunger, and you take that and you accept it because you only know that you want to make art, you are an artist.

And you will die and you will be forgotten and you will never be appreciated or loved, and you need to hold that so close to your heart that it becomes you. You need to know that that will happen and you need to want for nothing more in life than to make your art. You need to write with your blood, you need to draw in the sand, you need to sing until the whipping wind tears the song from your throat and leaves you choking as it screams. You don’t need to be willing to die for your art. You need to have already died.