Scratched Red Question Mark by takomabibelot

Today, ask yourself this most important of questions:

Why?

Why do you do it?

Why do you write? Why do you paint? Why do you play music? Why do you study every nook and cranny in the earth’s fleshy body? Why try to decipher the codes of our DNA? Why make things that buzz and whir and go fast and change worlds? I mean, really, why does any of it matter? No, silly, not to the rest of the world. Why does it matter to you?

Do you do it because you want to be famous? I spent years of my childhood trying to come up with ways to be famous. My friends and I would perform dances to the soundtrack of Footloose and Breakin‘ in our yards. We went door-to-door selling 25-cent tickets to our neighbors, a technique we’d learned from our school-sponsored sales of popcorn, candy, magazines and wrapping paper. Pro tip: Your neighbors have to buy stuff from you. So, we made our little tickets and made our neighbors buy them, and we put on basically awful performances until someone was smart enough to give us a pretend quarter and we realized the jig was up.

Anyway, I suspect that being famous is pretty miserable with the relentless workout schedule and the media hounding you at every turn.

Do you do it because you want someone amazing to love you? Maybe because you want to prove yourself? Do you imagine that it’s better than having a “real job?”

Of course, all these things are true for most of us, I’m sure. But I know deep down that fame is probably terrible, I already have someone amazing to love me, I don’t need to prove myself to anyone but myself, and I know damned well that writing is hard work if you intend to do it well and make a living on it.

The real reason I write is this:

I have an unrelenting need to create. My heart is like the mud pie factory my brother and I made as kids. It has this mountain of raw material to work with — all the stuff life — and the definition of a factory is that it must make things. So, my heart just keeps churning out these damned mud pies, and I call them poetry or whatever because that’s how I get by.

And you? What do you do?

Why?

Tags: art | creativity | question | why | writing

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