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thoughts are a most powerful and dangerous thing |
i was hung over from last night's band practice and called in sick at 4 am; didn't get out of bed afterwards till 10. rushed right on over to the compie to check mail, check my boards and get my daily dose of online comic fare. i always save megatokyo for last coz it's my favorite...
now, i must admit i haven't really been reading the "rants" section beneath each strip, partly because i picked up the strip when they had over 200 in their archives and i read all those straight through, not bothering with the asides from the creators. however, because it had been a while since their last strip and because i was playing hooky from school and had nothing better to do, decided to read this particular rant.
boy, howdy!
never before have i felt such a kinship with another human being concerning the creating process, and a virtual stranger at that. piro managed to put into so few words what i'd been antsing about these past months. he articulated quite eloquently what i - the writer - had been unable to explain. it alternately humbled me and relieved me: i'm not really as good at communicating as i thought, but i was no longer alone in my angst. i present his words as evidence:
I have a theory that most people out there are frustrated creators - you WANT to draw, you would LOVE to be able to make the things you enjoy, but due to what you consider lack of skills or ability, you are stuck in a 'consumer' mode. Sadly, that's exactly where the entertainment industry wants you - they don't WANT you making your own music. They don't WANT you making your own stories. They want you to buy them from people who can 'do it better than you can' because you only have so much attention span, and they want to own all of it. A few hundred years ago, before you could buy all your entertainment pre-packaged on nice shiny little disks or whatnot, people had to pretty much entertain themselves. Sure, there was always the traveling bard or musician that really could perform, but people would entertain themselves in the gaps. Over the years, the entertainment industry has done a very good job of convincing us that 'entertainment' isn't worth listening to, reading or watching unless it comes from them, in much the same way that we have a skewed idea of what 'beauty' is because girls compare themselves to what they see on TV and in magazines (leading to a lot of self worth problems and depression). Webcomics, as well as other things you find on the web, represent a challege to these schools of thought.
so what does this have to do with me? plenty. i'd been going through a mini mid mid-life crisis, not wanting to teach anymore but also a bit fearful about going out and starting from scratch. it's just not as simple anymore, what with a house and a husband and other such responsibilities. the ability to abandon everything at the drop of the hat was taken from me the minute i ceased being single and fancy-free.
i wanted to *do* something else with my life, however, and i'd always been told that one should search for a job wherein one does what one loves best. therein lies true happiness, i guess. so, i told myself that i loved to write, right? and i thought about pursuing my writing career whole-heartedly.
then i got scared.
who would pay me to do this? it seemed too easy, too good to be true. and what if i don't even get an offer? what if i was filled with hubris and nothing more? what if i really sucked as a writer? what if i wasn't - gasp! - commercial enough?
so i panicked and dropped my dreams of sending out manuscripts and such and crawled back into the stagnating embrace of my suburban life, bitter and disconsolate.
as if that wasn't bad enough - cowardly git that i am! - i also stopped writing.
i walked around in a daze for a bit after that - flitting through my days like a soulless wraith. i had no direction, no purpose. i just went through the motions of living because i wasn't stupid enough to attempt dying but neither was i courageous enough to fight for my dreams.
then i read piro's comments. a rant on a webcomic. granted, it's a damned popular webcomic, but it still amuses me to think that i received my epiphany from such a medium.
i read his rant. and it did something nothing else was able to do - it got me to start writing again. oh, i don't have the next great american novel under my belt yet. and i doubt i'll ever get print published although i *do* get my high from publishing my stuff on my site. will i quit teaching now? probably not. gotta pay the mortgage. but am i writing again? most assuredly!
it's a lonely, misunderstood road creators travel. i'm glad to find any kind of solace wherever i can. thanks, piro! i owe you one, man!