I Used to Think

              I used to think that to be an artist, you had to be sad, or tormented, or crazy. Or maybe that it was the sad, tormented, and crazy that became artists. Isn’t that what we’re taught? Hemingway was a depressive alcoholic. Van Gogh was tormented or insane, or both. Even Lewis Carroll and the Beatles were on drugs. It was an artist’s fate, and it was my fuel. Writing for me has always been an insatiable need, a drive, integral to my very breath. Writers block, or lack of inspiration, stung like a careless word on a secret insecurity. It nagged at my fingertips, and made my teeth itch. I needed fuel for the fire, and where did I go? My sadness. My depression. My tormented mind. That part of myself on the edge of losing my mind. My darkness. I dug it all out, tore off scabs, dug up mistakes I’d buried in the dark recesses of past repentance. And there was the flame, and the fury, and the tears, and there were poems, and deep thoughts, and odd paintings, and freakish obsessions, and these were comfortable. These fit in with the world, with society. These made me down to earth, approachable, the kind of person I always liked. These tore me away from my Creator.

I watched an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine recently with some kid friends. In it, they encounter a non-linear species, one that does not live from moment to moment but in all moments simultaneously. In an attempt to communicate, they kept bringing the captain back to the day his wife died. The captain tried to explain that this was the past, that it was over, that they were linear, and this was no longer happening. “Then why,” the entity asked, “do you still live here?” That question sent shivers through my bones. Every memory, every mistake, every lost friendship and missed opportunity… I lived in those. Those were my home, food, fodder for the starving artist.

I used to be afraid of changing too much. Of letting G-d become my everything. Of filling my moments with prayer and praise. I was afraid to let Him heal the broken parts of my spirit, because I thought that when I lost my pain, I’d lose my poetry. I was afraid that the one thing I loved most in this world would be stripped away from me and yes, I would have G-d, but I would no longer be me. No longer be down to earth and approachable. No more torment, no more accelerant for my fire. So I had a limit, a wall, a measuring stick on how much I would let Him in, let Him change me, and I was stuck there. Was.

My main man and me, all packed
              for the move to College Station.

Last weekend was Yom Kippur, the biblical holy day of repentance, of giving all your sins, all your past, all your doubts to G-d and becoming clean, white as snow, a new creation. I wanted that clean slate, I wanted to be of one mind with my Heavenly Father. I thought that one could repent and mean it but still be a little dark. Want to know something? You can’t be. You will never be wholly G-d’s. You will never be of one mind. G-d is light and light cannot exist without expelling darkness. I had to let go. I had to take my sins and give them to G-d, and this time I could not take them back. I could not reintegrate them into my synapses for my poetry. If I give them to G-d, they’re gone. No longer mine. I told G-d that I was afraid. Of losing myself. Of losing the gift He gave me. You know what He told me? He reminded me that He indeed was the one who gave me my gifts. They are not something I acquired because of my pain or darkness. Not something I gave myself. These gifts are just that, gifts. My gifts were given to be used by the best version of myself I could possibly be. The version that can be whole hearted with my G-d. I would not lose it. In fact, I would gain so much more, by being the person my poetry was meant to be written by. He was right, and I finally let Him in.

So here I am. A much different person than I was a week ago. My past is my past but it can no longer control me. I refused to let it own me, and now its power is lost. I am a new creation, full of light, and the desires of past have faded. And I’m still writing poetry.