An Open Letter To Those Who Love Me

Written 28 September 2013, 8.07pm.

I found this deep in my drafts folder the other day. I thought it was the perfect manifesto to start off this year. It has not been edited since July 2017.

(I'm not actually as depressed as the title makes it sound.)

Dear people in my life,

I think by now ya'll have noticed that I'm not exactly following your dreams for me. You know, the corporate dreams of me being some big-time lawyer or doctor or some other kind of genius. You have told me so many times over the years how smart I am, how smart I am, how smart I am. I get the sense that you figured I was some kind of a child prodigy or something. Cha-ching. Don't think I don't hear those cash registers in your heads.

Now, that may be true. Maybe I am a genius. I don't know. It depends what you're talking about, really (because if we're talking math, I am most definitely not a genius). But whatever the case, you all see me as intelligent. And I am not living up to your expectations of me.

I may be wrong (correct me if I am, I really do want to hear your honest take on this), but it seems to me you expected 'more' of me. I was to graduate high school and then go to college for perhaps a psychology or a medical or law degree. Something that would accentuate any speck of intelligence I possess. Something you could brag about to your co-workers to make you sound like you had some serious connections. And then, after spending four or perhaps ten irretrievable years of my years institutionalised, I would be ready to take on the world, to be the messiah, and you would have the privilege of saying you knew me before I was 'great.'

But it didn't work out that way. I graduated high school with... I don't know, integrity, I guess. I was willing to admit I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. And, perhaps more damagingly, I was not willing to commit to what I didn't know. I did not want to go to college for a degree that I wasn't sure I wanted, only to decide after three or more years' worth of money had been sunk into it that it really wasn't what I wanted to do after all. And then I would have been dishonest -- to you, to the school that would have had the misfortune of hosting me in such a case, to myself.

And I cannot be dishonest.

For two years you secretly hoped and outwardly 'spurred me on' (to put it politely). And then -- a miracle! -- suddenly the announcement came. I was going to college. Your hearts pounded. You were so excited. Finally I was going to live the life you had planned for me. Finally I was going to make good use of all my brains that I had been wasting for so long...

And now for my side of the story.

I have never been interested in committing more time than necessary to anything I am not fully interested in. Even in grade school: math. Math never interested me (nor did it make sense, but that's a different discussion), so I hated it. I would do whatever it took to do as little as possible... to waste as little of my life as I had to on such a pointless pursuit. (I know now that there is a point to some math, but that was my perspective at the time.) Second example: You all have had the misfortune of trying to make small talk with me. I'm not interested in small talk. 'Share how you really feel or shut up' has pretty much always been my guideline for conversation (for better or for worse). I'm not interested in small talk -- I hate these little social lies we tell each other -- so I don't do it. Like, at all.

By the time I graduated, I was keenly aware of the fact that I have one life to live. I have already used up twenty years of it just getting to this point. That leaves me with roughly sixty years remaining (give or take a decade or so). And there's no promises that I won't die earlier -- say, from an accident or something. Is it really wise to spend four years of those precious remaining years on school? School that I don't really want and may never need?

This was my logic behind not going to college immediately. I wanted to think it through first. I wanted to be sure what I was doing with my life, then decide if college would be necessary for that.

For two years I thought about this -- believe me, I thought about it. Hardly a second went by that I wasn't thinking about my future, praying about it, asking God what He had created me to do. It looked to you like I was just being lazy and mooching off my parents. Believe me, this was not the case. At the very least, it was not the intent.

Two years I pondered this. Two years I agonised. Two years I prayed.

I have to drop this train of thought now and back up a bit.

You didn't know this -- nobody really knew this till recently. You know I have been dancing ballet since I was six. What you did not know was that I have been making up dances in my head since I was seven. I didn't know it until those two years between high school and college, but I had found my passion by the time I was seven years old.

Choreography. Imagining dancers on the stage, coming together as a choir of movement, creating beauty. It captivated me.

At seventeen I began to take this seriously. At eighteen I choreographed and wrote down my first complete dance. Here is where this news began to leak out... that I was doing choreography.

You didn't know it, but I did. I had found my passion. This was my calling.

In those two years, I researched so much about careers in the arts. You have no idea how much I tried to spin it different ways, wanting the worst-case scenario so I knew what to expect, but wanting the best-case scenario so I could tell you something you could be proud of. So you would stop taking jabs at me for being lazy or stupid. Because I was not being lazy or stupid -- in fact, that was exactly what I was trying so hard to avoid.

I will tell you straight. Even the choreographers for big-name TV shows make about $20,000 a year, often less. And it's straight commission. If you don't have a project that month, you don't get paid that month. You are your own boss, and there's not a lot of demand for a choreographer. There's a reason you don't meet a lot of choreographers. It's because we don't need a lot of choreographers. Because nobody cares about the arts anymore. Ballet (true ballet, not this 'contemporary ballet' crap) is fast becoming a lost art, and hip hop, the dance of choice today, is largely choreographed by the performers themselves. When a classical ballet company does tour, they often mount the old classics -- Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker, Swan Lake... There is no need for a choreographer; those works already exist.

In fact, this is reality for the arts in general. Artists are overworked (mostly as volunteers), and they are severely underpaid. Some of the most talented artists of the past century languish in a furiously creative flurry... unnoticed. Loved only by a loyal handful, but misunderstood and rejected, then ignored, by everyone else.

This is the life I am called for.

I am called to live a life that not only has no retirement plan, it has barely enough money to buy the groceries every week.

I am called to toil in obscurity, perhaps for decades, not because of the quality of my work, but because perhaps God has seen fit that I choreograph for only a few.

I am called to a life of intense loneliness. No-one can understand what it's like to create a dance from scratch until they have done it. And even then, those without the passion cannot begin to imagine the thrill of the soul that so captures our imagination that we dream of pointe shoes at night; that demands we return, again and again, to the music, to the stages in our imaginations.

I am called to a life that no-one on this planet will ever understand. It will look intensely foolish to anyone who has never tasted the wine of creativity, and in this day and age, that's almost everyone.

I am called to daydream with a vengeance.

I am called to a life throughout which it is highly probable that I will be broke or near-broke, lonely and largely ignored, obscure and taunted by those who do not understand. I will very likely struggle, not because I'm not smart, but because this is my God-given passion and the gift He gave me. And when God gives a person a gift, they can not and will never be truly happy doing anything else.

So I will choreograph. I may dance, I may sing, I may play an instrument. But no amount of criticism from you will make me change my mind. I will not be happy doing anything else. Let me be happy doing this.

Can you live with that? Can you accept the fact that I will not be a doctor or a lawyer with a 'thriving' multimillion dollar practice? Can you accept the fact that I will sometimes ask aloud where my next meal is coming from -- when I know there are other, higher-paying jobs out there?

Power To The Young

Have you ever noticed that in all those Buzzfeed articles and other assorted Facebook-clogging 'news services' posts, they always emphasize it when someone is young?

'Amazing Six-Year-Old Sings Adele Better Than Adele.'

'Worldwide Ocean Cleanup Project Headed Up By Twenty-One-Year Old.'

'This Kid's Eminem Cover Is The Most Inspiring Thing Ever.'

Why? Why are you only good at something if you're young, if you're a prodigy?

This has been eating away at me for some time now.

See, the thing is: I'm not that old. I'm still in my early twenties. Barring unforeseen circumstances, I have another sixty or so years to go on this planet. So why do I already feel so much like a has-been that I actually have flashes of suicidal thoughts? What in the world would possess an intelligent and fairly skilled college-educated twentysomething with a close family and a good group of friends to even have the passing thought of suicide?

I feel irrelevant. Like I'm too old to be of any use to anybody anymore. I don't want my name on Buzzfeed or any of those other crappy 'news' sites (then there would definitely be some suicidal thoughts going on), but I want to be needed. I want to be able to touch people's lives. But I'm already too old. I expected to feel this way when I'm in my sixties, not my twenties. I literally just got out of school and already I'm useless. I haven't even had a chance to prove myself yet. I have nothing to grow into. My life is already over and I never got the chance to live.

Please... stop perpetuating this culture of 'only the young can be good at anything' and 'only the young are worth our time.' The young haven't had time to develop and perfect their craft and/or skills. The old have been toiling for years and know exactly how to get the results they want -- but they've already been silenced. We as a culture don't give them that chance. They have one shot of shallow brilliance at age seven and then we cast them aside before they get the chance to really grow into their promise. Look at... yes, I'm bringing him into this... Terry Scott Taylor. This man has been a professional songwriter for forty years. That's twice as long as I've even been alive. And while, yes, his early output with Daniel Amos (Horrendous Disc; ¡Alarma! Chronicles) was pretty freaking good (unlike most people's early output), you listen to later albums such as Dig Here Said The Angel (2013), the Swirling Eddies' The Midget, The Speck, And The Molecule (2007), or even MotorCycle (1993), and you can't help but notice a rich maturity pervading the entire project -- in the choice of words, in the choice of topic, in the approach to the arrangements, the musicianship, the vocal development, the crafting of the mood... everything.

Are we really so embroiled in hipster culture that we all want to be the first to discover the next Mozart and therefore are trying to promote younger and younger people in an attempt to say 'I knew of them first'? What does it do to the kids whose skill you're exploiting before it's ripe? What does it do to the older and truly accomplished who are consistently ignored? What does it do to normal twentysomethings like me who already feel like there's nothing left for us to give and so we might as well just give up everything?

Everybody loses.

And maybe this is why art is, in general, in such a deplorable state. There's no maturity, only tricks and explosions. And when art suffers, so does society.

Everybody loses.

The Desert

I loathe more than anything the feeling of not having an idea for something.
Whether writing, photography, dance... I've always had an idea for something at almost any given moment. My problem as an artist never used to be getting an idea, it was keeping up with the overabundance of ideas. In approximately twelve years of artist-like endeavours, I have never once run dry for more than maybe a week. Even then I'm usually working off such a backlog of previous ideas that I barely notice.
There's always something -- real life presents so many 'plot' twists and characters for writing, so many beautiful scenes and intricate detail for your camera to capture, so many movements for the human body to mimic. How can one possibly run out of ideas?
I have been reduced to counting. Counting out music 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4... Wanting to be able to say I've accomplished something that brings me closer to my dream of dance but in reality I'm just putting it off in a more sneaky way.
I need a bigger practice space. I need to move out because my family screams at each other at the slightest provocation if any at all and it screws up my concentration. I need to learn the real names of the steps so I can write it down more accurately. I need this, I need that...
No -- what I need is to get off my lazy backside, shove the headphones in, and dance. Breaking it down can come later. Dance the same steps over and over again, memorise it -- then attempt to write it down. Scream along to the White Heart or Flyleaf if need be but dance.
I have this chance wide open in front of me. Ability, training, some talent (I hope) -- all right here for the taking. I've been incredibly blessed in almost every way you could ask for a career in dance.
But I won't have it forever. There is no guarantee -- the human body is fragile. I know I have to do as much of it as I can before something happens that might disable me, but apparently the 'action' side of my brain hasn't figured that out. It's figured out (much to my decidedly not-artist family's consternation) that I'm not going to do anything else with my life, but it appears to have a problem with if you're not doing anything else, then actually get up and do the one thing you have decided you will. Seriously, have I really become this lazy?
I've already come to the conclusion that I'm going to set aside some time every day to work on choreography. At first I thought maybe fifteen minutes would be sufficient, but after putting that into practice I've discovered that the resulting fragmentation of the thought process means I would be better off not bothering. I really should know by now there's no way to get a quality result if you only work on something in fifteen-minute bursts.
So I'm going to look at my schedule and see if I can't pull together an hour every day, at least. It's going to be difficult here in August with the novel, but really, if I have time to write a novel, I have an extra hour somewhere that doesn't require Facebook in it.
So if I start posting rants about Facebook, it means I'm on Facebook instead of dancing and for that I hereby give you full permission to scold me. Facebook will always be there but my body will not always be young.

The Rest Of My Life

The other day a thought suddenly struck me.
Life is a lot more finite than we think.
Oh sure, everyone says life is short. Even the Bible says it's like a mist or a vapour. I knew in my head that I didn't have forever but it never really hit me until Thursday.
Given my current age and the average lifespan of my relatives, I have sixty, maybe seventy or eighty years left.
And sixty years isn't that long when you think about it. Most sixty-year-olds are still pretty spry and still love life (or maybe it's just the sixty-year-olds I know). When you think about it they're still pretty young.
Sixty years ago it was 1951. World War II had been over for more than five years already. I think when most people think 'sixty years ago' they automatically think Depression or World War II prior to doing the math.
Sixty years isn't that long.
And that's assuming I die of 'natural causes' on the young side of 'old.' What if I'm killed or severely injured or contract a heinous disease within the next year? Then what?
The people at my funeral would say "She was nice... I guess... but she was bullheaded and tactless and a master of the guilt trip. Always needed to keep things exactly the way they were and never entertained the thought of change. And she spent way too much time doing nothing on Facebook."
Real awe-inspiring.
For years I've wanted to form a dance troupe and tour around and if that isn't feasible I'd like to be a singer. On Thursday I realised it really is never going to happen if I sit on Facebook all day. I have to work on choreography every spare moment of the day if I'm going to get it off the ground when I'm still young enough to dance.
And that's only one aspect of my life.
What about the God who created me? I claim to love and serve Him, but do I? Probably not, at least not as well as I should. My conscience has been nagging at me for a while to read the Bible and pray more but I kept putting it off... tomorrow, tomorrow.
But my life -- even if I can make my dreams of dancing and/or singing a reality -- will be empty if it isn't to the glory of God. To know how best to glorify God, I must know God. And to know God, I must spend time with Him reading the Bible and praying and actually looking for Him instead of just doing it out of routine.
Maybe this is the wake-up call I've been praying halfheartedly for for so long. And hopefully this time I won't let it fade.

David Meece -- The Rest Of My Life
(from Learning To Trust; Star Song, 1989)