My Great Art

Back in November, I started this blog with a post titled "Great Pain." It began like this:

They say that great art comes from great pain. If that's true, I'd like to know how these artists keep themselves upright long enough to create anything in spite of said great pain, let alone something others might consider great. My great pain has me in a crumpled heap. Always mentally and emotionally, but often physically too. The last thing I feel capable of is creating art worthy of sharing with the world.

[You can read the entire post here: https://evensohope.blogspot.com/2016/11/great-pain_17.html]

I used to mistakenly think of art as being primarily for the consumer: an author writes a book, an actor performs a monologue, a painter paints a picture; all for an audience. It's an extremely (and embarrassingly) narrow-minded view, I admit. And maybe sometimes art is confined to a supply and demand mentality. But now I understand that art is first and foremost for the artist. Often only for the artist. And I'm realizing that creating art doesn't necessarily have to be a focused effort. It's an outpouring. And overflow. Oscar Wilde said, "To define is to limit." To put the concept of something as subjective as art in a box is to do the world a great disservice.

It occurred to me today that this entire year has been my art. My waves and my tides and my occasional transient stillness. My ebbing and flowing. My art is my decision to stay alive and the life I am creating despite my great pain. My art is my story and my symbolism. It's reassembling a shattered and raw heart, a gouging and subsequent filling of all my broken places. It's my courage to plunge headfirst into the deepest pain and find myself there. My art is my vulnerability and discovering the strength I didn't know was inside me. It's believing for truth even when the lies are louder. It's learning to forgive the seemingly unforgivable. It's daring to hope that someday someone will love me well and believing that I'm worthy of that. My art is my smile and finding reasons to laugh despite the heartache. My art is my resilience and the stories I tell in ink on my skin. My art is my bravery, my dreaming, my vastness. My capacity to feel things deeply. My art is learning and knowing and loving myself.

My great art is my fight.
My fight for healing.
My fight for grace where I feel everything but.
My fight for joy.
My fight for love.
My fight to believe in the good things coming.

Maybe my art is the mark I leave on the world and on the people I love. Maybe not everyone will understand or appreciate or even notice it, and maybe that's okay. Maybe eventually it will result in a more tangible form of art that I'll share on a larger scale, or maybe it will just be the legacy I leave behind. Whatever it is and whatever it becomes, I am proud. I am proud to still be standing, breathing, healing. Surviving this year is the hardest thing I've ever done, and I hope to high heaven that it's the hardest thing I'll ever have to do. It has been complicated and messy and a thousand other things, but above all, my art is mine.

And I've decided that it's beautiful.