II how dare i call myself an artist (and how dare i not)
This isn’t a labeling journey. Part II Truth Doesn’t Live in Tourist Attractions
Where were we? Ah yes, leaking the things that refused to be anything else, and calling it art.
we don’t paint reality, we paint what it felt like to survive it.
Skill is a party trick. There are painters who can bend light into lifelike miracles and yet have nothing behind their eyes but a copy machine. Skill without a feral worldview is just... polite craftsmanship. The ones I consider true artists have cracked lenses, screamed into the abyss, cried on their manuscripts, thrown them away, and started all over again... a fever dream that spills into everything they touch, whether or not their hands know what to do with it. Maybe having no skills actually helped. No training to tame it, no craft to hide behind. Just me, translating in a language I didn’t choose. Not with clay, or thread, or brush, but with language, that quiet, unassuming force capable of undoing hearts and shaping civilizations. the thing that makes men confess and nations fall. Patient, precise, merciless. And I feel, above all, grateful… so, so grateful to grasp not just the words, but the deeper language that gives them weight. If I were to die today, I’d die knowing it lived in me this creature made of thought, pulse, and fire.
Language is the only thing that lets me map the cybernetics of my psyche. Writing is how I make it almost human.
Writing was always the only thing that stayed. Writing like a bloodstream, writing like a second skeleton, writing because existence without it was a slow suffocation and I could feel the air getting thinner every time I tried to not write.
I think it's that kind of overwhelm, this immense something that comes to you (and you're just a humble vessel) that made me understand I am an artist. not the pretentious kind, or the label carrying one. just living with a worldview so twisted, so raw, it leaks out however it damn well pleases. I don’t set out to create art, I don’t believe in such things. I’m just trying to survive mechanically this unbearable intensity of feeling by giving it shape. I turn the absurd into something that lands softly, precisely, in places I swore were bulletproof. Why do I even do this to myself? No idea. And so I yap yap yap, write write write, cry cry cry…
because a hip hop lyric stitched my felt and rational brain together, because someone wore their pain like patched-up clothes, because someone still used their hands to bake bread that came out warm, like a small miracle, from a bakery kitchen.
It’s not sentimentality.
It’s recognition.
I see it (= feel it) in the things that were not supposed to be called art but refused to be anything else.
Maybe being an artist for me was about unshattering the idea of what I thought one should be, smashing the mirrors until there was nothing left but myself, my flattened vision and all. Of course, it was always writing. I can’t exist without writing. I write and I write and I write (Publishing is something else entirely, a beast that circles the work, hungry but never quite part of it)
I don’t think it’s about the quality of the writing, not really. DGAF about the polished edges or the clever turns. It’s the nakedness. The recognition of something too true, too unguarded, when you run into a piece of writing that feels like a doorway flung open in the rain. It’s an act of ownership, of laying your own skin down on the table and daring someone to look. Language stumbles around it, tries to dress it up, but the real thing always slips out naked anyway.
an uncontrollable leak, the absurdity I can't contain
I lived my life thinking that if I could just write it clean enough, beautiful enough, I could prove something… but beauty was another lie, because what matters is the gut-punch, the dizziness, the crack that runs through you because someone dared to put their own [_________] on the page first.
Writing thousands of pages didn’t teach me how to write better, it just scraped the rot off, layer after layer, until whatever voice I had left was too stubborn to pretend it was anything other than what it was.
My academic background almost convinced me that talent is measured by the power of literate paragraphs. but those are tourist attractions, and truth doesn’t live there.
Truth lives in the places where you walk in and come out different, shivering, missing some piece of your armor you thought would hold. Truth strips you raw, and if it doesn’t, it’s not truth yet!!!
It just took a long time to see that words alone couldn’t do it, that I had to go deeper, down into the part of myself that isn’t particularly human, the part that howls in metaphors and dreams in colors no eye could paint. It opened my eyes to what the inside of myself looks like. Not the outside. Not the careful arrangement of ideas. The real thing. The absurdity of it. The disjointed beauty.
I’m documenting all this absurdity because I don’t know how to live inside it quietly. I want to be able to say: this is what my storytelling “looks like”. No translations. No polite renditions. No fixed frames. Just this. Here you go, a snippet of my mind.
Part 1
