love

Do you choose love or your career? It’s a problem all artists seem to face.

Love becomes the ultimate distraction, pulling you away from your art. Sure, love can inspire and motivate, giving a depth to your art that wasn’t there before, but it can also stop it all together. You’re feeling deeply in life, in reality, and you want to live in it.

You don’t have unlimited time, and after work, you want to spend it with your love. When you’re alone, that’s the art. You come home, and you work further. But when you’re in love, you come home to the arms of your partner. And you revel in it. You don’t have to work any further; you get to relax in the peace of your partner; you get to shut off. 

But it’s every artists’ nightmare to shut off. To ignore the creative beast inside you, to tame it to sleep. That’s what life is about! Sharing and exploring your creativity. Giving the world something it doesn’t already have. 

But love? Anyone can fall in love. Anyone can feel giddy from the sight of a new boo. 

In a way, love is so mundane. 

But your art? Who can create that but yourself? No one – in the world – has the same creative insides as you. What you have to share is unique, new, exciting… It’s real. And it’s special. 

And when your love becomes that real, that consuming, you have to give up something of yourself – you’re giving yourself away to another person! And with that, you, piece-by-piece, give away your art. You let the other person become what your art used to be. You feel complete, but not in the way you were supposed to be. Not in the way your soul planned for you to be. 

So, perhaps, being alone is a necessity for the true artist. Feeling the loneliness of the world tightening it’s grip around your heart, pulsating each beat between it’s fingers… It’s not the tender safety of love, but it’s emotion, it’s real, it’s feeling… 

Perhaps as an artist, you have to accept that you are all you’re allowed to have – that you are the ultimate goal, to evoke and emote you as real as the bones in your body, sharing your soul with the world. 

Your soul can be private or it can be shared, but it can’t be both. You have to choose who you want to be. Someone who lies it all on the table, open for the world to see (to love and adore or to use and abuse) or someone who keeps it hidden, sharing it simply with their most treasured. 

You have to choose. 

A person you’ve never even met! You have to give them up to preserve your future.

It’s not a choice you get to make with all the answers laid out in front of you; it’s one you make in the dark, with your eyes shut, solely listening to the sound of your gut. 

For the risk is too high. To think you can have it all, just to lose your art forever, when you weren’t even looking – poof – it’s gone: you wake up one day, realizing, it slipped away without your noticing, without asking, just gone. You somehow became the person who didn’t have to create anymore. You changed. 

Change can be good, but it has to be a choice. It has to be active. It has to be what you’re fighting for. When you change without your noticing, when you let yourself be guided by another, you let yourself change, but into the person someone else wanted you to be, not who your soul is screaming at you to be. You forego your soul to please another. 

So what about soul mates? What about the people who perfectly fit into the puzzle pieces of your soul? What about them? 

Ah, the perfect distraction. Your soul may feel fulfilled, but your art will be lost in the eye’s of another. There is no way around it. The universe has set the rules, and you have to choose. 

Will it be your art or your love?