Read this before you burn it all down.
It's not the art you hate. It's this.
My blood is curdling.
It’s the only way I know how to describe where my mind is heading, despite the ankle-biting truth that I have no fucking idea why anyone would know what “bloodcurdling” meant without a great deal of imagination.
How does blood curdle, exactly? Does it curdle like milk? Or does it take on a new form no one understands unless they suffer through the unfortunate intimacy of getting to know what curdled blood is firsthand?
It’s this thought train that snakes me down another rabbit hole. Thing is, when these rabbits come and fetch you and drag you through these wayward tunnels, they’re rescuers in disguise. They stroll into your labyrinthine conscience with good intentions buoying their risen hackles and curious, swiveling ears.
Only right now, the rabbits come to save me, and I can’t accept their offer.
While my blood curdles, my chest tightens.
My heart speeds up. My breath comes out in shallow rasps. Hair-thin tears stream down my face as I look at the Instagram profile I had been asked to open up immediately on the night of my aunt’s wedding.
The hotel hallway is cold and smells like mildew.
My laptop is open on my lap. My phone is propped against my shoulder, pressed too close to my ear—it’s warm, sweaty, and humming with that cancer-inducing glow people write panicked articles about—as the snapping jaws of the witch echo through the line, and I listen to her savagery before I nod along and pretend that I agree with the bullshit she’s learned to wear like a suit of armor when she’s too afraid to admit she’s replaced her curdled blood with her own lies for years, and years, and years.
I don’t hate her, though. I feel her anxiety. Her worry. She’s only a witch because other witches have done this to her. It’s how I rationalize the venom she dresses her words with every day. It’s how I forgive her inconsistencies—the text threads proving the imagery and captions I wrote for our Instagram were approved by her, even though she claims she never saw them.
It’s past midnight, and my mother opens the door to our shared hotel room. We all traveled here for my aunt’s winter wedding. She’s furious. I nod at her quietly, and even though her eyes are narrowed in the kind of maternal rage you would long for from a mother, she respects the boundary I place with a quiet: “I have to take this, I’m sorry,” before she closes the door, and leaves me be.
The witch makes me walk through every post. Read the caption back to her. She claims I made the brand look like a “dumpster fire.” I didn’t necessarily believe that, but her words cut somewhere deeper than flesh.
This was not where the bloodcurdling began.
It was where it steamed over and spilled into the remainder of my body without warning. Hours earlier, I had received a slew of text messages, while trying to escape from work during the first couple of days I had taken off—to visit a family member’s wedding, of all things—in over two years.
Working for this witch led to physical and mental degradation that still follow me to this day.
In those two and a half years of performing a generalist job for this person, I had lost over twenty pounds of muscle. My mind was like that of a pinball machine; too raucous to allow me to eat, or listen to those desires to eat. The lymph nodes in my neck had become so swollen that I was convinced I had three different types of cancer; I had started to look for symptoms that wasn’t there—nonexistent lumps in my breast tissue; an invisible curvature I believed was my rapidly swelling spleen; old freckles I thought were fresh signs of a skin cancer I had been very, very lucky to avoid in the past during my collegiate tennis career.
Through it all, I had lost any desire to write.
My novels, a forgotten pile of documents in the deepest web of my computer. Gathering dust. Gathering self-loathing. My self-taught courses on copywriting I invested in with my own hard-earned money, flipped through and rigorously studied, but feeling like an utter waste of time with how controlled and passionless I was. My dreams turning into colorless nightmares, all because I was too cowardly to leave the witch behind, the business she had built, the Jekyll and Hyde persona that drew me in to care for her and hate her with every piece of me that still allowed itself to feel.
Soon, my blood stopped curdling. It became distant. A whisper. A memory of what anger used to feel like. I could no longer feel angry. I walked into work numb, and afraid. I walked away from work afraid, and numb. I was too cowardly to look at a possible future where I wasn’t under the thumb of a witch.
Only my fear of death kept me from doing anything rash.
To save you the grief of a long, convoluted story of building an exit when I had none, just know this—I believed that my only way out was through a skill I no longer believed I was good at, which was writing. And so, I believed that the only thing keeping me prisoner, was writing.
Writing was—is—my reason to live.
It’s as essential as oxygen. As romantic as air. It’s the reason I was born. The desire to tell stories, to craft narratives, to write from the heart as well as the soul, has always been ingrained into my DNA.
But this experience, and many others soon after, would challenge me. It would push me to look at my vocations and wonder if I truly hated the craft, or if I hated the environment that tried to control my craft.
It’s taken me over ten years to realize that it’s the latter, not the former.
Do not let the monstrous actions of others determine your love of your art. Do not let the monstrous thoughts of yourself determine your love of your art. Do not let the misguided intentions of your brain determine your love of your art. Do not let your desire for freedom determine your love of your art. Do not let your nightmares determine your love of your art. Do not let your dreams determine your love of your art.
Your art is you. It breathes with you. It grows with you. It will fail you, and it will challenge you. It will put you in a position where you must face the temptation to break up your marriage with it, if that’s what it takes to find its truth, its reason to exist within you. Your art will make you question everything and question nothing. It will bring you the greatest joy and the deepest pain.
I’m a writer who writes many things. I write fiction with immense passion. I write copy and brand stories with an addiction that I’ve allowed to raise from the ashes. I write songs with a voice that doesn’t suit it, because my vocals are about as pleasant to listen to as shattered glass, but I do find solace and interest in carving imagery and emotions to lyrics and thoughts.
I write because I must.
For a long time, I believed specific categories of writing were my enemy.
Copywriting, in particular.
On top of that, writing for others made me so miserable. For bosses, for some clients. Controlled corporate and startup environments made me want to explode and piece myself back together with what little hope I could claw back toward my bones from the pile of animated remains.
I’ve recently pivoted my practice because of this.
As an entrepreneur who loves business as much as she loves strict creative expression, I realized there was absolutely no reason to keep the two passion directions separate. They can exist one and the same, and find harmony within a unique symbiotic relationship that can only be made possible through a vision I call my own.
You can do the same for yourself.
Perhaps it’s not the vocation you want to burn to the ground. Maybe it’s where you’re doing it. Maybe it’s not the person you work for, but how you work for them. Maybe it’s not the business model on its own, but how you’ve approached it. Maybe it’s not the art, but the perspective in which you’ve created the art.
Before you burn everything to the ground, ask yourself if it’s the foundation you hate, or the environment you’ve built around it.
Ask yourself if it’s the art, or what you’ve allowed to corrupt its meaning.
These are two very different things.
If you are a person who feels and thinks very deeply, and you create with passion, and have both tenacity and a bloodcurdling desire to build whatever you can with this one life you get to live on this planet…
It’s not the vocation.
It’s the method you’ve used to bring it to life.
If it doesn’t feel right… it’s time to pivot.
Not burn it all down.
- Taylor