Inspiration.

So on a day that I have cried like demons were grabbing at my soul all the live-long day, I had the most gorgeous epiphany as I prepared to dance.

I recently asked a new friend to read some of my fiction. My real real fiction. The stuff I treasure as being part of a whole. At any rate, I'm going to be entering a fiction contest within the next week. My dear friend, Matthew Limpede , along with one of my spirit sisters--who probably doesn't want me just dropping her name on the internets...let's call her Munzies...she'll enjoy that nickname--helped me narrow down the stories I should enter. And although they agreed on one, I needed some help picking the two winners for sure.

So I asked my new friend to help me out. And then she said something to me that really brought home what Elizabeth Gilbert was talking about the other day...if a slight variation. My new friend commented on the maturity of my writing. I guess this is something some people have suggested about my writing (ahem...commenting on what other people think about my writing makes me incredibly uncomfortable...good or bad). I always take this as a super compliment because I suppose relatively speaking my academic training is slightly limited. So coming from my new friend, it meant a lot. Yet it wasn't until specifically she said it to me that I realized why that might be.

It wasn't until she said this that I realized I might have been blessed enough to inherit someone else's creativity fairy.

I'm going to tell you a story. The details will be vague because discussion of all this just tends to make me even more incredibly uncomfortable. It's actually something never discussed in my fiction as of yet.

At one time in my life I was rather sick. I mean I don't know if I'd say it was life-threatening. I will say people die from it, and it's a bit of a rough situation no matter what course it takes (within reason). Point is, I was sick. And I was pretty fucked-up sad and fearful when I found out I was sick.

(Not at first you realize. At first I snapped at my mother in the doctor's office to not cry. That she had no right to cry when I wasn't. My words become this box of nails when I'm truly sad. At first I held my best friend while she cried that she couldn't lose me, too (grown accustomed to people dying or not even existing at too young of an age--she loves me like a sister). At first I didn't cry and at first I didn't think.)

But all of this hit me like a case of bricks in the middle of my beginning painting class (beginning of my junior year of college). I was bad at painting. Maybe someone wouldn't call my beginning paintings bad--but I don't believe they would call them promising. But I was in painting class to understand the toil of the artist before further studying my actual interest--art history.

So I'm in this painting class and I'm none too impressive and I don't mind one bit. Until three days after I find out I might be really sick. When my professor comes by and suggests some help for creating a straighter line and I burst into tears. He took me in the other room to talk...just leaving the class behind.

As it turned out, something I hadn't quite grasped though he had touched on it in his introduction, the professor was a survivor of a similar form of illness. I guess at the time because I wasn't familiar with it myself, I didn't realize the severity of the situation...medical wise. Now don't get me wrong. Please. His illness was more dangerous than mine...they're just rather similar.

But something happened that day when he talked with me. He turned around my whole way of thinking. He told me I could cry for the day...but then the next I was going to have to pull myself together and get better. That I was my only real resource out of the situation. And I decided on that day to not think like someone that wasn't going to get better. Quite honestly, I just decided that day that the world hadn't seen enough of who I might fantastically become. I just wasn't done.

So I got better. And about a month out before I was going to be all done with having to do medical things to get better, something very sad occurred.

It was in April. And it really was fucking cruel to feel.

This professor who had helped me know how to see. This artist who had written me e-mails of well wishes even as he got sick again. This inspiration who had been a real friend without any type of ulterior motive and hardly knowing me. He had died. His song was done and it seemed there was perhaps no music left in the world.

I was very sad. I suppose at times I'm still really sad. Part of this is the fact that I didn't allow myself to even mourn his death for so long. Not really. I felt foolish for grief over a man who I hardly knew. A man whose family would not know me and friends would not recognize. My sadness felt overwhelmingly stupid and the only thing worse than sadness is shameful sadness.

One month later I began my first college creative writing course because I needed to create. I couldn't bare to just keep staring at other's creations. I couldn't paint, but I had to make something beautiful.

I started writing very pretty words to describe some often times ugly things. (And I don't mean necessarily what I do with my words is pretty. I mean I pick words that I find beautiful in visual form. I guess I sorta pick pretty colors to paint with, but I'm not saying my pictures are pretty.)

Let me tell you something about my friend, the artist's later works. He started painting his illness prior to diagnosis. And then after it was a rather sad or rather mystically ordained irony. I have stood in an art gallery and listened to a man critique the colors of my friend's work. (The colors he said!) I have sat on the floor and heard others say it was pure light beaming from a background. The thing is...he was making something very ugly into something very beautiful.

Just like he told me to do the day I found out life doesn't always last as long as you think it might. He told me to take that ugly possibility of dying and use it to make my life sparkle. I guess I might have made a few fast and not necessarily sound decisions since I turned out to be okay. But life does move quicker sometimes than you expect it to.

But realizing today that maybe I had someone else's fairies on my side. That maybe he left those behind for me. It was the most beautifully reassuring thing I've felt in a while. You see I was always a lover of the arts...but actually doing it...actually trying to say this is what I'm going to do because I think I'm good enough to make it on my creative merit....that was fucking scary. And I'm incredibly fortunate to have been gifted with guardian angel fairies. Because really, it would just be incredibly arrogant of me to think I have any sort of gift on my own. It is a gift...but only a fleeting one given to the fancies of the muses and fairies and spirits out there facilitating creative existence. And that it is why every day I try to remember to be grateful that I have ever written anything good at all in my life.

And I guess that's what it really means for an artist to have creative legacy. Leaving that feeling in someone that they were born to create. I hope maybe that's a bond I don't have to feel ashamed for mourning.

xoxo

(Extra x's and o's to my story tie-breaking friend. She's a bit of a secret and I liked to keep her that way...but I do hope she realizes how much I needed this little pick-me-up. Because it also made me realize a few further things. But that's for later thought.)