art is sustenance
Our culture has a weird relationship with art.
There’s no way to make money doing art, our culture tells us first. (And our culture absolutely worships making money.)
If you ARE doing art, it had better be able to be monetized, like at least starting a side hustle.
And if you’re not making money, you should be helping people, our culture tells us next. (Especially if you’re a woman or have been socialized as a woman.)
(And if you want to do art just for pleasure? I mean, there’s so many other things we’re socialized to want to do instead, like scroll social media, watch Netflix, declutter the house, or buy stuff. Because that’s what capitalism needs us to do.)
At the very bottom of the list, our culture might concede that art could be a nice thing, like if you’re doing it for therapy or as a hobby. As long as you aren’t taking too much time from your paying job, your family, your children, or your caregiving responsibilities.
BUT HERE’S THE THING.
Art is not a nice-to-have.
It’s not a warm-and-fuzzy, cute hobby.
Art is sustenance.
I WILL DIE ON THIS HILL.
The actor Ethan Hawke has a fantastic TED talk called “Give Yourself Permission to Be Creative” (watch it here; it’s only about nine minutes) where he says this exact thing. Art is sustenance.
He says, “[People] have a life to life, and they're not really that concerned with Allen Ginsberg's poems or anybody's poems, until their father dies, they go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don't love you anymore, and all of a sudden, you're desperate for making sense out of this life, and, ‘Has anybody ever felt this bad before? How did they come out of this cloud?’
“Or the inverse -- something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes. You love them so much, you can't even see straight. You know, you're dizzy. ‘Did anybody feel like this before? What is happening to me?’ And that's when art's not a luxury, it's actually sustenance. We need it.”
So I invite you to stop viewing your writing as a hobby, a nice-to-have, an I’ll-get-to-writing-that-book-one-day, and view it as sustenance.
Life-giving.
Life-nourishing.
Because, as Brene Brown once said, “Unused creativity is not benign.”
Make the thing. Write the book. Sustain your life.