Artful Lies

I’ve been sad lately. That’s a new one for me.

Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “Luke, my god! Have you read your stories or listened to yourself over the last couple years?”. There’s a good possibility you’re also thinking “Oh, the person who pretends to be sad for the sake of being that guy is still supposedly sad?”. Now, if you’re the first then that’s fairly understandable but what you should know is there’s a difference between depressive episodes and sadness. The former is like being in a dark cave and wondering why you’re being swallowed by hateful things, while the second is just your garden-variety human emotion. I get lost in bad places all the time, but I’m rarely sad. Sadness is a lingering ache, it stays, and it clings to your heart with a grip born of caring and love.

Side Note: If you’re person two, the one who thinks I’m a product of my own creation, drop dead. I’m serious. I hope you get run over by a fat child on a powerwheel and dragged along a gravel road for 140 miles.

Anyway. Where was I? Right. Sadness.

This is new. I’m angry at times, irritated almost always, sometimes happy, and often depressed for weeks on end (thankfully never months), but I’m not sad. Or I’m not ‘usually’ sad, anyway. But 2019 has been full of new things so I suppose it makes sense that some of those new things wouldn’t be good. See, I’m going through a lot. I can’t tell you what those things are because, even though I’m an open man and this place is a world for me to scream from the top of a very small mountain, some things can’t be said. Sometimes the things you want to talk about can’t be talked about in front of the people those things are about and so, if you’re like me, you wind up having to be obtuse and calculating when you’d rather just blurt the whole thing out in an avalanche of painful and terrible emotions that have been clogging up your arteries like a fucking hotdog of sadness.

See? Like that.

So I’ve been sad and the one thing they always say in the “Comprehensive Artist’s Manual” is that art is therapy. You know what, though? It’s not. That’s a lie. Now is it a lie for all you creative types? Of course not. Maybe you got a different edition of the manual with more helpful tips on the topic of how to clean out your emotional drains like you’re pumping Drano through an IV. All I know is, my manual sucks because writing about those sad things never helps me feel better. The funny thing is, it doesn’t even come close. By the end of the creative process, I’m left looking at this new sweet child of mine and wondering why, for all the honesty it represents, I find no answers in the words or the spaces between them.

There’s just a poem or a story spread out before me that wasn’t there a few hours ago. And the person who wrote it? Well. It turns out the ache doesn’t go away and sometimes writing it all down just makes it worse.

I’ve thought a lot about this. Over the last couple months I’ve sat back and wondered if maybe I shouldn’t write about these sad things I’m going through. What is the point, after all? If it doesn’t change the situation and it doesn’t change the struggle, then what the hell am I doing? Maybe it would be better to pour every bit of resentment and crippling loss into a funny story where all new terrible things happen to terrible people. Maybe I should finish the book I’ve been writing for months. And yet here we are, hanging out in the midst of a creative resurgence that has wobbled over on the back of an unstable giraffe with arthritis and a drinking problem. I’m writing about the things that are making me sad and to be honest, I still don’t know why.

Forgive the rambling nature of this blog post. If you somehow haven’t figured it out already, this is how I try to make sense of things and it seems more real and valid as a coping mechanism if it’s somewhere open and free. My mind is a lot of things, but it’s not that.

See, every time I write something that is about or inspired by that which is slowly eating me alive like a very small cannibal, I understand it a little bit better. The pain doesn’t go away. The sadness doesn’t fade. But I understand it more. Now from an objective angle, that’s pretty nice. At least I’m not lying about on a fainting couch wondering about the finer points of what’s suffocating me beneath a particularly ugly pillow. Each time I write a story or a poem, I see a little more clearly the truth of the world around me. I don’t know why my expectation had always been that such clarity would help. It doesn’t. Just as it doesn’t make you feel better if you see clearly the face of the man who’s beating you to death with a hammer, nor does it bolster you to understand the worst parts of your life and why they hurt so much.

Instead, you’re left to just sit there and think: “Huh. It really is that shitty, isn’t it?”

The manual I was given (on audio book when cassettes were a thing and my imagination was better) said that art would set me free. I could write about the sad things and the sad things would go away. Well I’m here to tell you that they don’t and whoever wrote that book is an idiot. They’re still there and they probably always will be, because the drive to create cathartic art driven by the sad things is a reflection of where you’re at in that moment. It’s a snapshot. You don’t get to magically change. You don’t pass Go and collect $200. You’re still in the same place, in the same time, and the man you were is the man you are: Just as sad but with some spiffy art to show for it.

The lie is that art will fix things. It won’t. At least not for me. Everything I do is a piece of who I am and I’m just not at all used to seeing sadness in the worlds I write. Anger? Sure. Existential dread? Absolutely. Quirk and whimsy and fear? Of course. But not sadness. Sadness is new and it’s a side of myself I don’t often see. It hurts, I think. It hurts a little more every day.

And so I write. I thought about burning (literally) every poem and story that is coming out of this pain. I thought about not writing it at all. But I suppose in reading this blog post, you can see that I decided against all things of that nature. Because you see, there is no upside in this. There is no winning hand. I won’t come out on the other side of it as a better person or a stronger one and I won’t have some filter of clarity that I never had before. I’ll still be me and the things that are weighing so heavy I think my back might break? Well. They’ll still be there. I can no more outrun them than I can outrun my own shadow or the darkness of the night.

So at the very least, I might as well leave a little piece of them behind. An artful lie in a breadcrumb left to be eaten by a bird or ignored altogether. At least it will be there. At least, after all this, there will be something to show for things I’ve felt. That matters, right? Probably not. But after all this, it helps to think that it might.