photo by Kate Schroeder. And I really don’t like these glasses, but this is a rare pic of me actually smiling. Hmm…

It’s a tough thing, getting inspiration for your art. For so much of my life, I have claimed that pain has wrought the best creativity from me. I happily fulfilled the role of the tortured artist…there was something romantic about it, something noble in suffering for one’s art. But 2012 has been a strange year, and though I would love to say “it’s been a great year!” or “God, what a crappy year”, I can’t really sum it up so neatly. And yet, it’s been one of the most prolific years for my art. I feel like I’m turning a corner, both professionally and personally, with choices that will have seismic consequences for the rest of my life. The biggest changes internally have come in the last three months.
I started this blog to chronicle what it feels like to leave the career you’ve known for so long, in my case retail management, and start a new career doing only things that fulfill you artistically and creatively. I have no formal training, just brains and enthusiasm. Oh, and optimism. Lots of optimism.

But the blog has slowly become something else. Ostensibly, it was started to log my creative projects, but now it is starting to also become a record of personal breakthroughs and challenges, as well as the professional ones. A recent personal breakthrough came as the result of a particularly challenging friendship. Without going too much into detail, I was ready to explore the possibility of a relationship, he was not…I’ve never felt this way about anyone, and it laid me pretty bare. Knowing him changed me fundamentally, in ways that my friends are still surprised by.

Ultimately, his (quite justified) reticence was the result of a cycle of abrupt and cruel breakups that ended with him…a cruel ouroboros. The friendship between us was difficult to maintain, so we said our final goodbyes…or did we? I hope we’ll reconnect in the future, when he’s ready, and maybe the timing will be better, but I can’t count on that.

The choice I faced was to either lay down and give up, to become cynical, to close myself off to possibilities, and to close myself off to amazing people who might be right in front of my face. But I chose not to. I chose to break the cycle, and at great personal, emotional risk, make myself just as open and vulnerable for the next person who I let into my life.

My approach to my art is like that. It would be so easy when I write something that I feel people just “don’t get”, or when I have a short play I direct “voted down” in my theater’s Serial Killers program, or when I make a painting that people refuse to compliment…it would be so easy to get discouraged, to give up, and to let precedent inform how I am going to approach things in the future. It’s easy to be cynical. It’s easy to fear, to be scared. It’s even more tempting when you feel like you create beautiful art, your best work, when you are suffering.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am suffering so much from the friendship ending. Not reaching out to him is a daily struggle. This isn’t easy, in either realm, and I do learn from constructive criticism, in both my art and in love. It takes effort. It’s so hard to be brave. But what possibilities do I ignore, what wonderful things do I not see, when I close myself off because I am afraid to get hurt again? I have friends who praise my resilience in the face of adversity. They admire my ability to keep getting up after getting knocked down. These are friends I gotta keep around.

I wish just saying these words could inspire people to do the same. But we’re all on our journeys, hoping to find perfect intersections of risk and reward. We all need different things from different people in our lives, and we all create differently, too. I’m finally learning that it’s far better, it’s a far braver choice, to choose to be that optimist, and to have hope. I won’t become cynical. I will create with joy in my heart, not fear. I refuse to have my future decisions informed by disappointing precedents.

Be brave. Don’t be scared. Be brave.