There was this one quote I read on Tumblr that stuck with me for a long time. I printed it out and stuck it on the wall in front of my table, so I can see it every time I sit down. I will quote it down below:

"So much of getting good at anything is just pure labor: figuring out how to try and then offering up the hours. If you're doing it wrong you can do it a thousand times and not produce any particularly interesting results. So you have to make sure you're trying the right way.

[...]

Donna Tart once said in an interview that if the writer's not having fun the reader isn't either; I think people make the best thing when they love the process, when they willingly shoulder the inherent uncertainty and pain that comes with it. It's almost like a form of prayer, you offer up what you can even though the reward is uncertain. You do it out of love."

I think about this quote frequently. Not only because it's connected to my practice of art, but also because it's a perfect piece of writing that speaks to me wholeheartedly about why artists choose to become artists but not any other vocation, although the reward is something they cannot see clearly down the horizon. My pre-teen years, drawing different hairstyles and clothes in a notebook that was supposed to be for class and dreaming of being a fashion designer, blurred into fourteen year old me drafting stories and poems about all sorts of feelings that I thought I had a grasp of, writing stories about people who live half the earth away from me, blurred into my seventeen years old stopped writing and drawing because I needed to live a bit more. The realization dawned on me that I did not understand the feelings I wrote about as much as I thought I did. I also became conscious of my own limits, my lack of experience and talent.

I will never be the best. I wasn't born with talent. I cannot make it no matter how hard I try.

So I stopped trying. I stopped drawing. I stopped writing. I stacked my shelf with books and spent my days reading with any time I squeezed out of school. Books became a sacred realm for me, forging alternative realities where I could for a brief moment, forget my day to day cycle of school and extracurricular activities and indeed indulge myself with human experience, ones I thought I understood but not quite. Words never failed to amaze me how much of human emotions one is capable of feeling and describing. I realized how much of life I haven't had yet. Slowly it became clearer to me how after all this time, I became so conscious of my own limits that I forgot why I started doing art in the first place.

I remember my first story published on Wattpad called "lost star", based on the cover by Adam Levine. It feels funny writing this because it all feels like a fever dream when I no longer have the draft in hand, proving that the incident did happen, that the story manifested itself into words and not just a creation of my imagination. I had a huge writing block after reaching quite a desirable number of followers from age 14 to 17, and it felt almost impossible to come through. Everytime I opened up my laptop, my mind went blank, like someone turned off an invisible switch inside my head and I was left in the dark, lost and confused. Closing my account with the hope that one day I would open it up, that it was just a short break. After a couple of weeks, no, perhaps after a couple of months, it will all work out in the end.

I never opened it again.

And here I am, after all these years, after tons of sketchbooks put away in a dusty box next to my table in my childhood bedroom in Viet Nam, after deleting my two writing accounts and therefore lost all of my writing during teen years, after picking up yet another form of art and somehow managed to keep it going for four years, writing down these lines. At the age twenty one, I still struggle to find out the meaning behind all of this. Why can't I seem to give up art if I believe I wasn't born for it? Why do I still manage to keep trying, despite a voice inside my head telling me I had been in the same spot too many times before? Why can't I draw a lesson out of my lack of talent, and stop trying once and for all? I cannot help but feel like there has to be a justification to all of it, yet not until a piece of someone's writing from Substack was reposted on Tumblr, everything was revealed so painfully clear to me. The answer has been in front of myself all along.

"It's almost like a form of prayer, you offer up what you can even though the reward is uncertain. You do it out of love."

Something so simple yet beautifully written. I recall Dostoevsky's writing "I believe the world will be saved by beauty." It might be too much of a stretch, aligning what I strive for with a great writer in the history of literature; however, I believe there are grounds for such a strong association to exist. I bounced between various forms of art, searching for the one medium that will best throw my thoughts to the vast giant abyss out there, unaware that it all led to Rome in the end. I do it out of love.

26/10/2024