Vulnerability in Art

     Art demands every piece of us.
     Art, and the making of it, commands respect, and insists on nothing less than everything we are; it's why we, as artists, choose to work dead-end jobs while we bang out that novel; it's why we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a school everyone told us wasn't worth it; its why we eschew safety and isolate ourselves from the outside world.
     Art demands nothing less than one hundred percent.
     This doesn't mean that being an artist means having to give up friends and family, or needing to work a dead-end job or study art in school or live a difficult life, but it's because art demands so much of us that many of us choose to do these things.  It doesn't mean we can't live, though we often have to live harder, faster, more fully, while making time to create and support ourselves at the time.
     What it does mean is that in order to create art, we must be vulnerable.
     Art is cutting yourself open and bleeding on the page, on canvas, on stage, on screen--art is destroying yourself and giving away pieces of your soul.  If you can't be vulnerable in your work, you won't produce art--stories, sure, pictures, plays, but not something novel, fresh, stimulating--that's what art is.  Art makes you think, makes you feel.  Art is a piece of yourself, carved out of your heart and plastered up for all to see.
     In order to create art, you have to be willing to go there, to accept whatever story wanders into your heart without censorship or fear, because to an artist, nothing is taboo--nothing can be taboo, because even if you're promoting the tabooness of something, you have to be able to recreate it, to explain it, to get into the heads of those who partake in the deeds.
     One of the things I'm learning in my acting classes is how to be vulnerable--I'm not a vulnerable person in nature, I was always taught to be strong and keep others out of my head, but when you're acting on the camera you can't do that; you have to look another person straight in the eyes, and you have to maintain that eye contact except at very specific moments, no matter how hard it gets.
     To be an actor you have to be vulnerable all the time--there are times you'll have to strip naked, times you'll have to bleed out, times you'll have to bumble around and look like an idiot, and as a writer it's the same deal; you have to write characters that are totally unlike you, characters you hate that you have to make three dimensional, likable even, and characters you love that are flawed out the ass.
     You'll have to write about things that make your skin crawl, you'll have to revisit traumatizing moments in your life to access the raw emotion that makes your characters feel real, you might even have to seek out new traumas in order to understand what your characters are going through.  You have to be willing to cut yourself open, and then cut again, and keep cutting and cutting until there is nothing left of you to give.
     But the beautiful--and terrifying--thing about art is that there will always be more of you to give. Creativity isn't a limited resource; the more of it you give, the more you get back, and every time you consume the art of others it changes and recharges you.  Every experience you have, good or ill, gives you something new to write about, draw, paint, new fodder for your acting, for whatever it is that you create.
      Art is not easy; it can very, very difficult, in fact.  But it's what we do, because we love it, and because we need it.  I've never met another artist that didn't have things burning underneath their skin that didn't have a fierce and driving need to get it out, out, out, before the wind caught it up and it consumed them.
     There are a lot of reasons we produce art--to be seen, heard, validated, to make change, to make waves, to keep things the same, to express oneself, to deal with what one has been through in their own life, to help others--and art is never twice the same.  Your entire life can't be creation, because if you never lived or experienced or consumed you'd never have anything to write about!
     But you have to be willing to let yourself give the page everything you are.  A lot of it may never see the light of day--we edit and have editors for a reason--but if you never bleed there will be nothing worth editing away.
     Art demands commitment, it demands sacrifice, it demands love and hate and raw primordial emotion the depths of which are murky and barely understood by the person feeling them--but most of all, it demands you.  Because you are the only you, and trying to be anyone or anything else is inauthentic, false, a lie--art is about truth.  If nothing else, it's about the truth of you.
     So you do you.  Bleed on the page.
     (You know you want to.)