The Price of Art

Florence + The Machine’s song “King” perfectly expresses the price and weight of creating art:

“the very thing you’re best at is the thing that hurts the most, but you need your rotten heart, your dazzling pain like diamond rings, you need to go to war to find material to sing, I am no mother, I am no bride, I am king…”

Essentially, art is best created from pain, strife and chaos. Artists are the masters of expressing emotions through all mediums. We may not be able to verbalize it, but we can certainly make you feel something deeply with our creations.

Another essential, I believe, is space. Not square footage, but room to breathe and time to contemplate and explore. For instance, I took a week off this summer to spend time with my son. We planned nothing and each day we played and found adventure by intuition. At night I wrote, edited, re-wrote and so on and before I knew it I had over 80,000 words written. Every night for nearly 8 days I worked till all hours of the morning. That was over a month ago and since then the inspiration has come at a much slower pace.

This slow down tells me that the weight of motherhood, the stress of work and the drain of my reality is sucking the creativity out of my body. It tells me exactly what I have feared for most of my adult life, that doing the opposite of what you love will ultimately tap you out of what you are meant to do. Much like how adulthood decimates the creativity and belief in magic we held so tightly as children.

All I can tell you is that if I am not creating, I am dying and there is nothing sadder than a writer/creative on life support.