Gods, Artists, and Queens

I've got one album on repeat and the world is my oyster.

I’ve been having trouble writing. 

Hell, I’ve been having trouble reading. My attention span has shriveled into a husk of nothing. But, I’ve been living. I’m listening to a lot of music, or rather, I’m listening to a little bit of music a lot of times—right now it’s the record by boygenius. I sang “Not Strong Enough” at karaoke, and though I didn’t do it justice, I felt powerful belting out those lyrics, probably off key. I’ve been mulling over the phrase, “Always an angel, never a god” since I first heard it, and I am so ready to enter my god era—making things happen because I want them to happen instead of existing solely to make others comfortable. It’s a box I’ve attempted to free myself from for a very long time. I’m optimistic that I now have the drive to actually do so.

I started jogging over the summer and have a bench in the park where I always stop to rest before I walk home. This morning, my bench and those beside it were blocked off because someone decided to defile the park by erecting chain link fences throughout it (because who doesn’t want a park that’s indistinguishable from a prison?), so I had to run a few minutes further and up some stairs to get to the next bench. It felt monumental. I always take my break at the same place, reasoning that if I push myself too hard too fast—like I’ve done in the past—I’ll burn out and give up jogging altogether, but today showed me that I’m being overly cautious and not trusting my true abilities. Had the city not started that horrible construction, I would have never realized how strong I’ve grown since July. How many times have I relied on an external force to push me into something I was ready but too scared to do? Always an angel, never a god. 

I spent last September exploring museums of Philadelphia, and I spent this September exploring museums of Italy: the Uffizi, Galleria dell'Accademia, and Palazzo Pitti in Florence; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice; and the Vatican Museums in Rome. I’ll be thinking and writing about this trip for a long time, but for now I’ll say that one of my most enlightening experiences happened at the Galleria dell'Accademia, the museum that holds Michelangelo’s David.

Yes—David was amazing, but seeing Michelangelo’s unfinished statues, the Prisoners, that line the hall leading up to this immense masterpiece, all I could think about was how this titan of art who changed sculpture forever abandoned project after project—getting bored or distracted or frustrated or thinking that his work wasn’t good enough.

The thing about standing in the actual places where artists I’ve heard about my entire life lived and worked is that they started feeling more like humans and less like abstractions. I imagine Michelangelo had conversations with his friends similar to the ones I have with mine about feeling uninspired or overworked or like making anything is pointless because none of it will last anyway. I want this jolt of inspiration to wake me up enough to liberate some of my own prisoners from my Google Docs.

Even in my fallow periods, hearing artists discuss their craft or even their lives gives me an energy that propels me to at least think about creating again. I had a moment like that last night, listening to The Bald and the Beautiful interview between Katya and Jinkx, and while a lot of the episode was fun and silly, toward the end Jinkx spoke about her relationship to performing (she also talks about Italy, which felt like something). Even when she was in the throes of her darkest moments, performing always brought her some amount of light. The most encouraging thing she said was that even though it can feel futile creating while so much suffering and horrible events are happening, art has an ability to not only offer escape but to offer truth, and as an artist, living in your truth—performing the truest version of yourself possible—is an imperative, important function that society absolutely needs. 

Here’s to standing in our truths, to becoming our own gods.