and i feel alive in a way i haven’t in years

originally published on substack on dec 7, 2022

a decade of creative block is a weird thing. my ability to create became a heavy secret i carried around. it became the stuff of ‘fun facts about me’ at workplace icebreakers, “i can actually draw lol”. but it never felt like lol. it felt like what the fuck happened, like the muse left me, my abilities left me, my desire to express myself left me. i have some guesses as to why it disappeared, and why i could never get it back by brute force.

i suspect it has a lot to do with alienation and spiritual violence. for various reasons, i worked too much for most of my 20s. I also self-helped myself with endless individualist approaches to healing, which only tightened the spiral of alienation and kept me clinging to its coils as i continued my descent.

i’ve never been an artist with a goal other than putting my tools to paper and seeing what happens. drawing has never been something i could commodify or make a living from. i wonder now how big a role that played in me laying down my pens for so long.

as i have begun drawing again, i have experienced a curious sense of homecoming. it does not feel like i have come home, but that something has come home to me. i feel like a conduit for a force outside myself. i feel lucky to experience this.

i decided to start this project because of how much ai art i see published every day. everything is nuanced and complicated and i am an expert in nothing, but i know ai art is dangerous and harmful to artists. i know those harms exist because of the web of oppressive systems we live within, and i know those very same systems stopped me from engaging with myself as an artist.

i also know i did not resurrect my connection to art by myself. i did it by talking about art, by inviting people to make art with me, and by accepting invitations to make art with them. i had to rely on others to help me get here. i needed my community to teach me that false starts are not actually false when we stop measuring ourselves against a rigged game.

we don’t heal alone but in community. we don’t survive capitalism as artists unless we lift each other up in resistance.