Everybody wants to come to my party... that's right.
I heard the question "do you believe you suffer for your art?" on the CBC today... It struck me immediately in a million different ways. It hit the nerve of the artist, it hit the nerve of the girl who has loved artists, it hit... well, many of the nerves in my body...
and left me wondering... why? why do we "suffer" for our art? Why not take joy in our art? Why do we all have to be the Van Gogh's with the missing ears in order to believe we have accomplished something.
And it made me question the validity of caring about those that I am beginning to assume do choose to suffer. Choose so much so that they will not stay in one place, will not give any one person the chance to truly make them smile, because what then? How do you stay the tortured artist with a smile on your face?
I would like to smile every day, at something, at nothing, at other people's triumphs and the people that I have let in to my life that would like me to smile with them.
My Grandmother's fall made me see clearer. And while it may sound awful to someone standing outside of my bubble, made me smile more because I remembered why smiling is so important.
... and because I refuse to suffer for my art, because I choose to find the happy in the sad, I am able to make that poor suffering woman chained to her hospital bed by tubes and bruises, a broken wrist and a damaged head smile... and laugh, just for me.
And all that mattered a week ago seems so distant now that I wondered how it mattered at all.
and left me wondering... why? why do we "suffer" for our art? Why not take joy in our art? Why do we all have to be the Van Gogh's with the missing ears in order to believe we have accomplished something.
And it made me question the validity of caring about those that I am beginning to assume do choose to suffer. Choose so much so that they will not stay in one place, will not give any one person the chance to truly make them smile, because what then? How do you stay the tortured artist with a smile on your face?
I would like to smile every day, at something, at nothing, at other people's triumphs and the people that I have let in to my life that would like me to smile with them.
My Grandmother's fall made me see clearer. And while it may sound awful to someone standing outside of my bubble, made me smile more because I remembered why smiling is so important.
... and because I refuse to suffer for my art, because I choose to find the happy in the sad, I am able to make that poor suffering woman chained to her hospital bed by tubes and bruises, a broken wrist and a damaged head smile... and laugh, just for me.
And all that mattered a week ago seems so distant now that I wondered how it mattered at all.