Creativity Is A Bad Romance

I spend more time handling dead rats than a mob boss who just found out his crew is wired. Not a pleasure cruise in my life, just another strange turn for a reptile owner.

My ball python is about five years old now, and despite possessing the same level of emotional complexity as an influencer, I’ve grown pretty attached to the dumb little fuck.

My affinity for misunderstood creatures has put me in some odd situations. Like county jail, divorce court, a hot air balloon festival. Standing over the sink checking a rodent corpse with a digital thermometer and a tea kettle.

Snake ownership is low maintenance until it isn’t.

Most people assume you toss a rat in a box every couple of weeks and call it an evening.

In reality, I’ve spent hours of my life researching humidity levels, enclosure sizes, feeding schedules, substrate options, and whether or not blue eyed leucistics enjoy Swedish death metal.

The other night, I was trying to feed him and everything went sideways.

The rat ended up in the water dish.

He completely lost track of it. Like the briefcase in The Big Lebowski.

I watched him spend the next ten minutes trying to eat the thing backwards. It was like dad after a few dozen garage beers trying to parallel park the truck he eventually ended up driving to heaven.

At one point I found myself genuinely concerned that he might be too stupid to survive.

Eventually, he figured it out. He was fine.

But I still spent the next hour researching if the rat had cooled off too much.

That’s the thing about caring. It makes you look crazier than Doc Brown trying to explain the space time continuum to a teenager in 1955.

The moment you become responsible for something, your brain starts running calculations that matter less than the terms and conditions on a software update.

You notice problems other people don’t.

You worry about things other people never think about.

You carry weight that doesn’t exist for anyone else in the room.

And the more you care, the heavier it gets.

That’s the creators  burden. It’s not the making things. It’s the caring about things deeply enough that you become responsible for them.

Most people assume the making is the hard part.

It’s not.

The hard part is continuing to make things after you’ve learned how little the world owes them.

When you’re young, creating feels magical.

You draw because it’s fun.

You write because you feel like you have something to say.

You pick up a camera because you see a beautiful sunset and think to yourself; “I bet my accountant is fucking me in the ass.”

You start a band because you love music. Or because you figure it’s a good way to get some free drinks and some stank on your hang low.

There’s no audience in your head yet. No metrics. No strategy. No deadlines. No content calendar.

Just curiosity.

Then somewhere along the way, things get complicated.

You realize that every piece of work leaves the safety of your hands and enters a world that doesn’t know how much of your life is inside it.

The drawing took twenty minutes.

Learning how to do it fast and clean took twenty years.

The tattoo took four hours.

Learning exactly where to leave open skin and where to put solid black took a decade.

People only see the finished product. They almost never see the cost, the engineering, or the trial and error it took to get there.

And maybe that’s the creator’s burden.

Not making the work.

Carrying the invisible weight of everything required to make the work.

The failures nobody remembers.

The ideas you spent hours on to realize they were 24 karat horseshit.

The nights spent staring at a blank screen wondering if you’re out of juice.

The projects that have been sitting on a hard drive since the Obama administration tax penalized us for not buying a fuck ass health care plan.

The years where nobody gave one tenth of one shit.

Creating isn’t just producing things.

It’s volunteering for disappointment on a regular basis.

You can spend a month making something and watch it disappear in an afternoon.

You can pour your heart into a project and get less attention than some dumb whore flashing her busted biscuit on Instagram.

Even though that thing looks like the donation bin at Goodwill because it’s more ran through than a stop sign in the suburbs.

You can do everything right and still be ignored.

In fact, if you’ve been creating long enough, being ignored isn’t the exception.

It’s the default setting.

And yet…

People keep making things.

Writers keep writing.

Musicians keep recording.

Artists keep drawing.

Tattooers keep pretending angel numbers are cool.

Not because it’s easy.

Not because it’s profitable.

And definitely not because it’s always rewarding.

They do it because there’s a certain kind of person who can’t help themselves.

A certain kind of person who sees an empty page and feels obligated to fill it.

Who imagines epic stories.

Who hears music inside their head.

Who sees a blank wall and wants to smear shit all over it. Or duct tape a banana.

The burden isn’t the work.

The burden is giving a fuck.

Giving a fuck enough to keep going when the applause fades.

Giving a fuck enough to keep improving when nobody’s watching.

Giving a fuck enough to make things that may very well outlive your interest in them.

Or completely disappear.

Because every creator eventually discovers that making things is only half the job.

The other half is a leather studded kiss in the sand.