This morning I’m sitting with the windows open, listening to distant city sounds of traffic and construction, mixed with bird calls and the wind in the treetops. It’s October 5, and Austin has just now begun to cool down after yet another unbearable summer. The sounds coming in have been a literal wakeup call for me. As if hearing a voice from a thousand years ago, I am reminded of magic I once knew so well it was indistinguishable from my personality.
The past decade has been an exercise in numbing myself. We all like to think that our constant engagement with short form electronic content is somehow making us more aware, but I’m here to testify that this is delusion. I see it clearly this morning, and for once, I have no desire to look away. Those devices that keep us in a chokehold are actually preventing us from something much bigger and more powerful: our birthright as creators.
It’s funny to me how the term ‘creator’ has been appropriated by these bloated capitalist tech fiefdoms. How quickly they harnessed our natural need to express and share, and replaced these with a set of rules by which we must live and die or risk total irrelevance. How quickly they have cut us off from original interpretation by rewarding regurgitation of pablum and the passé with algorithms designed to cater to the lowest common denominator. How easily we’ve been led to believe that we are required by some universal law to spend hours engaging in ‘discourse’ even around our sacred art. For each instance of genuine expression there is an endless line of fools prepared to litigate our creative impulses, demanding justification for our perspective. At this point, most of us don’t even actively engage with this nonsense. We just share what someone else has expressed to save what precious creative energy we still have left.
I’m getting older, and quickly. This is, of course, perfectly natural, but for some reason we all encounter aging as if it were a unique problem for each of us to solve. We pour great expense into allaying the signs of our maturity (often to the point of absurdity). We find escape anywhere we can from the looming clouds. Millions of microseconds each day, dedicated to consuming anything that will help us avoid thinking about mortality. When we do think of death, it must always be in terms of greatness, legacy and fighting to the death for some noble cause that justifies our existence. Those unproductive distractions are a drug. They offer us only an illusion of influencing public opinion on the things we hold dear. But the content we “make” for a virtual world is ephemera. The content we consume in those digital “social” spaces, even more so.
I long for something that is not disposable. This means refusing to fritter away my creative energies, living in the moment, and placing more emphasis on what is tangible, buildable, and impervious to the whims and algorithms of those capricious gods who dwell in C-suites and congregate like vultures around conference tables.
In retrospect, a good part of why I’ve allowed myself to be robbed of my power comes down to having lived most of my life with very low self-esteem. When one is in doubt of one’s own value from the get-go, the trade of personal power for superficial expressions of love and adoration require no thought. I spent decades pissing away my energies on digital properties owned by terrible men, and for what? “Likes”? Comments from people telling me how funny I am? Parasocial adoration from people who haven’t an inkling who I am? What a fool.
As I’ve healed and come to value my innate self, I’ve also begun to see clearly where I’m lacking as a writer. The creative work I want to do – that I know I am capable of doing – requires far more energy than I’ve put into my work til now. My perspective demands excellence, and it’s only because I know love myself that I realize that it’s worth investing into developing it. Its unfortunate that I took so long to arrive at this point, as I still have so much to learn and the time I have left to produce work is diminishing.
Still, with what time I have left, I want to do it. I want to write – and write well. Not for recognition, but because it’s a calling. One that I’ve always had, but never quite knew how to answer. What a shame that I had so much to untangle before I could stand here, free and ready to apply myself to the work of my life. It’s hard not to be resentful of the things that made me, bound me; kept me at the mercy of others’ approval and the fear of some manufactured cosmic failure to be lovable.
But resentment is a waste of precious energy, and at this point, I’m feeling powerfully selfish with my access to creative energy. A holy kind of selfishness, if such a thing can be true. Creative energy is an unlimited resource in this universe, but my own ability to tap it and use it for art has never been properly cultivated. Add to that half a lifetime of bad habits in the form of quick and easy consumption and “creation” in the digital space and I’m not sure I’ll have the time to become the kind of creator that leaves something of value to this world before I die.
That said, the legacy of my embodiment as an authentic creator is the least of my worries. At this point, all I want to do is recapture what was lost and see if I can do something with it. For myself. For the joy of it. To fulfill a purpose that has gone ignored and suppressed for too long. If that is all I do, then so be it. But nothing else interests me now.
What I want is something real. To be a conduit for authentic creative power, a lens unique to a specific time and place in the eternal stream of things. To know that I’ve existed and lived and taken part in a process that the greatest among us have since time immemorial. To be counted among the creators, even if my work leaves no lasting mark. That is what I wish for myself.
Please, please, do not let me fall back asleep.