Are You Willing To Commit To The Reality That Lies Beyond The Fantasy?
I’ve written an article discussing what it means to stay passionate about your craft and why we tend to fall back in the hands of uncertainty when we are not met with the idealized results we fantasize about despite our efforts.
That piece was very near and dear to me because I also tackled The Tortured Artist archetype and what it means to be a struggling creator who goes through a constant cycle of self-loathing, doubts, and frustration over one’s work and how the people around us underestimate our passion.
If you have struggled with your craft and have even reached a breaking point where you feel discouraged and start to wonder if this passion was even supposed to be a passion, to begin with, you should know that it’s an emotionally draining process.
For others, however, it’s a weirdly romanticized representation of what it means to be an artist.
This idea came to mind while I was watching R.C Waldun’s video titled How Do You Know If You’ve Found Your Passion? Which I highly recommend watching, by the way.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I can understand the appeal, the aesthetics rather, of why some people are lured in by the persona of The Tortured Artist.
You’re probably cultivating a very detailed scenario of an old man whose skin is decorated by countless wrinkles caused by working late at night, the same skin engulfed by the wool sweater which swallows him whole to beat the frosty bites of the January winter that lingers in the gloomy air.
As he somberly walks through his gray, looking cabin located in the middle of the country-side, he slowly but surely sinks himself on his wooden desk that’s positioned facing the window so he can marvelously gaze at mother nature before him — the murky grass and the hazy clouds that eclipse the incandescent sunlight which peeks through gaps of his curtains.
Tracing his aching fingers over his typewriter, inhaling and exhaling a tired breath as he stretches the bones of his palms, tired but never at rest, as he continues writing his memoir which contains all his life’s adventures — spilling out in colorful abstract words onto the sheet of paper which has become the canvas of his own life’s painting.
That’s what you’re thinking when I pitch the idea of a Tortured Artist, right?
Realistically, however, a tortured artist may just end up being a twenty-year-old-something Joe residing in a one-bedroom apartment in a very polluted city, hunched over a laptop that’s lagging every other five minutes as they hastily try to finish their manuscript because time is running fast and publishing companies are literal monsters who will not wait for you to pitch your revolutionary ideas before they find another a writer who’s probably ten times faster than you are, and will probably do more for their company, so you might as well not even try.
Or an aspiring dancer who’s probably being yelled at by their mentor because their moves are too stiff, but it’s because of their anxiety that the mentor isn’t noticing because they only continue to compare the dancer to their peers, who could only look at them in contempt.
Or an artist who’s being criticized for their uneven brushstrokes and overly complicated style their colleagues can’t seem to comprehend, because what they need is realism, not complexity.
But of course, the aesthetic appeal matters more to the public eye than the meaning of the work, so they just set aside their original intentions and instead take note about how they need to use more acrylics than oil paints next time so it’ll look neater.
That is the reality that tortured artists go through.
It’s not how the media chooses to portray Vincent van Gogh, depicting him as this agonized painter who utilized his pain to create magnificent bodies of work that went up in museums, which to be fair, is how it all ended up.
But the media never elaborated on the pain he went through as a painter that led to his demise, his declining mental health, the multiple rejections done by critics over his paintings, how some of his most notable works such as Irises and The Starry Night were all done in a psychiatric ward which he admitted himself into during some of the lowest points of his life.
All that’s been said about Vincent was that “Yeah, he was sad and in pain, but his sadness was what created the art that’s ogled at today.”
No, that’s just romanticizing the idea of beating yourself down so capitalism can consume something of your creation to make money out of in exchange for mental and physical exhaustion on your behalf.
He never got to witness the success of his art but instead just went through the emotional and mental turmoil of creating them, and that isn’t something to be glamorized. Depression and declining mental health shouldn’t be disguised in the form of a sad, lonely creative mind.
That’s just one of the many topics I wanted to touch on for the point of this article. A lot of the time people just desire the idea of being viewed as a tortured soul who uses their pain to develop beauty within their surroundings, because it gives depth to their disposition.
They don’t want to devote themselves to the life of mental and physical labor every day, they just like the aesthetic appeal of it all.
Theoretically speaking, this might be the cause as to why people fall in and out of their hobbies and dream jobs once they realized that oh, this is not what I thought I signed up for. At all.
They catered to the scenarios of what happens after the hard work, not taking into account the actual labor that comes into play to achieve those indulgences that they were lusting after.
This is why it’s better to ask someone what job they would like to commit to for the long term, instead of just asking them what they want to become.
Because anyone could just say what they want to become without looking at things in-depth, everything is simply better from afar not until you take a closer look at it — you need to know if you’re truly passionate about something, or you’re just in it for the fantasy.
Which, don’t get me wrong, it is absolutely fine to fantasize about what you want to achieve and do in this life, I encourage it even because that’s how actual creative minds get started, that’s how I got started.
Even now, I still do it because sometimes reality and all of its mundanity can be insufferable and we need the bridges of ideas and possibilities to walk on to arrive at our true potential and what we want out of life.
But sometimes, doing that simply isn’t enough to prepare you for what the real world has to offer once you’ve devoted yourself to the goal.
As much as I hate to burst one’s bubble, the sad reality for all of us is we all go through hurdles even in things we love doing. Whether it be hobbies that morphed into careers, devoting yourself to an idea of becoming something also means devoting yourself to the good and ugly of it all — and not just the good, because unfortunately life isn’t like that.
You can’t just say that you want something or want to become someone without reconsidering the inevitable mishaps that come along the way.
It isn’t until you’ve gone through the struggles is when you’ll find yourself saying “This isn’t what I wanted!”
But it is, by wanting something means that you’ll have to embrace not only the euphoric moments but also moments that aren’t so perfect.
When you completely lose control over the steering wheel but still convince yourself that you need to drive through this road, despite the chances of a dead-end, it isn’t guaranteed that you’ll gain overnight success because that simply doesn’t exist.
What does exist, of course, is the sporadic days of joy, anguish, and hurt but also self-fulfillment, because you can’t always stay loving the same thing for the rest of your life.
From time to time, you will find yourself loathing what you do but at the same time… accepting it as it is. Because you know this is what you were destined for, in all of its dents and cracks, you know that as much as it hurts and feels unbearable now and then is that you can’t picture yourself doing anything else other than this, and that’s when you’ll know.
You won’t need a cottagecore setting to get into the mood, and nor would you need to embody an archetype to fit the role that you aspire to be, a lot of the time you just do it and morph into the archetype without even realizing it, and you get down to doing what you love because you know this is a part of you, in all of its imperfect glory.
You tolerate the headaches and the burnouts that come with it, but also find yourself immersed in the art that you create, realizing that this is who I am —
And how you wouldn’t want it any other way.
