Life Is Tragic, But You Don't Have To Be

Life Is Tragic, But You Don't Have To Be
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“Til Death” shirt available via Kult Clothing

“Til Death” shirt available via Kult Clothing

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UGH, doesn't life just really suck sometimes? I mean seriously. Everything blows. People suck. School sucks. The weather? Yeah it sucks. One more time: LIFE SUCKS!

Okay, now that I got that out of my system, let’s really chat. Or, I guess you’ll read and I’ll write about why life sucks so much!!! Until it doesn't. Because life isn’t the worst thing in the world, we just tell ourselves that when we don’t want to accept responsibility for our own misfortunes.

This morning I woke up and I wanted to scream. I looked at my phone and growled. Yes, I growled, like a chihuahua that has no business growling at anybody. I punched my pillow. Glared at the faint light creeping through my blinds, and then turned over to face the wall housing my closet. Finally I turned over again, and bit back tears. This morning, I woke up so mad that I almost brought myself to genuine tears over something that I can admit, doesn’t even matter in the grand scheme of things.

My point is that I do this thing, that I am sure many of you do too, where I dwell. I let emotions pile up and consume me until I feel like I am drowning in the sea that is my nervous system. At this point I will call any number of people ranging from my mom to a handful of friends. Then, I write. I use my bottled up emotions as creative fuel for my art.

Hobbies are an incredibly crucial part of life. If you don’t have anything that you can mindlessly take part in when you’re feeling your worst, then what do you have? While I’m trying to turn writing into a career, it did start out as a hobby. I remember growing up and feeling so misunderstood, like the only people who “got me” were my pens, notebooks, and laptop. So, when I was upset I would write. When I was happy, I would write. When I felt anything, I wrote. This morning, I made a note to myself, “Use this feeling, use your anger, use your passion to create something raw enough that you will remember this moment.” That’s what I’m doing. Now, let me dissect my own thought process.

“Take your broken heart and turn it into art.” A bit melodramatic of a quote, sure, but it’s still on my mood board (and completely unrelated to why I was upset). I relish feeling my feelings, but it is so hard to break that addictive spiral of hopelessness that I manipulate to draw my artistic ability from. So, now the task is finding a balance. A happy-medium where I can say, “This is what I feel, and this is what can come from it.” Feelings and writing tend to be mutually exclusive. What is harmful as an artist/creator/writer/person is when you draw from your feelings in order to create, and then you trick yourself into thinking that your feelings are a direct mirror to what the world is like. They’re not. Life does not suck (all the time).

I remember becoming completely enamored with Jack Kerouac in high school. He was/is my idol, my everything, at one point I started telling people he was my dad (ironically, and in a figurative sense of course). I was obsessed. Kerouac is flawed beyond belief, he was an alcoholic, manic, and reliant on others more than himself. He was destroyed by his own perception of the world and how said perception ultimately affected his mental/emotional states.

Ernest Hemingway, is another idol of mine, another alcoholic, another writer with a tragic view of the world around him. I don’t think this harmful pattern is a coincidence. For every great, there is some sort of tragic story, a tragic end; a flawed person behind the magnificent art that has come from the unrest, which we refuse to do more than romanticize. It’s always for the story, something beautiful can always come from your demise. At this point, extreme feelings are caveats to artistry. I keep wondering why we do this to ourselves.

In true romantic fashion, I too, love this idea of a tragic life. A sucky life. A tragic, spiteful, life filled with equal parts confusion and hate and adoration. I said it before, I’ll say it again, I love feeling my feelings. Now I just need to get to the base of this fixation. How do we reel it in and stop being so self deprecating in order to create our art?

How do I learn to draw the line between catharsis and masochism? When do we call ourselves on our own bullshit and say, “What I perceive to be real, and what is actually real are not always mutually exclusive entities, and that is okay.”? This is so important to do, because there will be days where you don’t feel anything about what you’re creating or writing. But you should do it anyway. Conversely, there will be days when all of your feelings can only be translated into your writing/art/what have you, and it will be so powerful, so magnificent.

In the end, I guess it’s true that life doesn’t actually suck. It may start off rocky and that may influence how you feel, which ultimately you can choose to do whatever you want with. Maybe you should write about it, or maybe just let yourself feel what you feel and move on.

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