You are too young to understand me but I am going to tell you anyway. Pick the task. Select the medium. Find the art that sets you free and breaks your heart into a million little pieces and go after it with everything you got.
And don't give your soul to anything else. Ever. Fuck corporate America and fuck a govt. job and fuck working where the other slaves wear the best suits. All of it. Refuse to play the game. Don't work to do anything but keep yourself from starving.
Don't be a sucker.
Be alive.
Ignore the safety that comes with numbers. Shun the middle of the pack. Be brave. Take the lumps and the failures and the loneliness. Pick yourself up every time the world passes you by. Wear your scars like fancy ribbons. And look every lemming in their goddamn face as you are being condemned.
They do not possess you.
You are mine. You come from me.
You are different. You are the children of American artists. And you are free to scream your name from the roofs of skyscrapers and mountains and check cashing places and strip malls and nail salons and backwater truck stops on the highway of life.
Hear me.
Ignore sports. Ignore Wall Street. Ignore sitcoms.
You are different.
The rules of society are not for you.
They are for slaves. And you are not slaves.
You are giants. And nothing can stop you.
So go ahead and reach for those paints. Go ahead and reach for that keyboard. That cloth. That torch.
Make something.
Create. PROVE you were here.
Because later. After everyone who can leave has left (and they will) and every successful drone has smirked their smirk from behind the window of their better car and every soul-crushing job has fired or not hired you.
You will be left with you. That's it.
And when you look into a mirror,
if all you have to show for yourself is a comfy bank acct. and a house where no one can get you,
it is going to feel like you never lived at all.
We are here to create. Let us always embrace our task and our noblest of professions.
Before I had my fingers on these keys, they were wrapped around a pen. Before that, a pencil.
I've always had my words with me, my children.
And I've never once regretted the lonely road this writing game unveiled.
