Give Yourself Permission to Be Different

It feels like it’s been a while. It has been a while. I’ve been trying to reconnect and it hasn’t been going well.

It’s not that writing feels like work really, but that I’ve kinda become upset with the branding that has come with it. I have lost touch with it. I don’t want to do it. And it kind of sucks to see people who want to see me write become disappointed by the fact that I have given up something real to live this dream life and I have somehow managed to latch on-to a failure mentality before I’ve even started my career.

I have forgotten why it was so important to me to do this. Judge me all you want, I had forgotten why it was so important for me to read books or to listen to good music. It’s been a while since I’ve wanted to see an unpopular movie for the story. And the things that once inspired me kinda taste stale and stupid now. I don’t know if this is maturity or hormones or something else entirely. I once wanted to be an artist and now I kind of don’t know why it mattered so much.

There are some brave people out there who can show their real wounds to anyone who’ll see and get it licked by them. I can’t bring the courage to do that. And apparently, that’s how the creative life is supposed to work. People are supposed to feed off of or relate to your bullshit life.

Some tell me to be brave and to write about things that scare me and hurt me the most because creating is a liberating thing. I once believed that too. I can’t quite remember why though.

I remember this thing I heard in a Les Brown video I was forced to watch by a friend some time ago. I might be paraphrasing because I don’t want to get up and find the quote. Nonetheless, he said something like, “When you tell people about something unfortunate that happened to you, eighty percent don’t care and twenty percent will just be glad it’s you and not them.”

I don’t want my career to be me showing off just how much I can fail at being a normal person because as much as I can, I’m trying not to offend too many people because I don’t want to be alone.

There was a certain appeal to being alone. Like it was interesting because at the time I knew if I wanted it, there was a group of people I could return to. It’s different now. It’s not a choice anymore and I wonder if that pretentious artist’s life where I get to feel like I understand the meaning behind rainbows and clouds is worth it. I think maybe the beauty in creating was that I knew I was making something I liked and well…

I’ve kind of outgrown trying to be the person who looks at stars and rainbows and tries to find the meaning in them. It’s a transition from Imagine Dragons and Panic! At the Disco to Twenty-One Pilots and Arctic Monkeys’ The Ultracheese.

The heavy millennial duty of believing that I can do anything has been won by the idea that there are some things I can’t control. More like there is very little that I can control and know it can always get worse.

I’m pretty sure I was going somewhere with this blog entry and I’ve been getting comments that some of my entries pretend to have big ideas and just stop smack in what seems like the middle.

I’m very sorry I dragged you into this.