The Muse(um) of Your Inner Artist
follow the whispers
There is a voice that lives inside you,
small as you were back then.
Before the world got loud and you started making mistakes that mattered.
Before you learned that wanting things was embarrassing,
and having opinions was futile,
and taking up space put you in the way of danger,
but also in the way of your dreams.
The voice got louder.
You shushed it with a job that trapped you with golden handcuffs.
The free drugs and the travel and the best friends that felt like family all egging each other on in our habitually bad behavior.
You covered it with relationships you knew you shouldn’t be in because the men were as bad as you allowed them to be.
You camouflaged it with a very impressive collection of wellness content and spiritual fuckery…
A morning routine you abandoned every February and picked back up in Virgo Season.
The voice, being nothing if not endlessly patient, kept pestering you with it’s backhanded whispers about who you should be dating,
and at what point you claim “good enough”.
It’s the voice that says asking for more is greedy
even at $0.85 to every dollar the boys take home.
You know the voice I mean.
The voice is the one that follows you into the stable career with the Roth IRA and the 401K
and maybe those are the same thing but you didn’t listen to your momma.
The whisper though, that’s the one that comes at 2am one when you’re rubbing your feet like a grasshopper under the covers
and you have the best idea you’ve ever had.
And forget it in the morning.
Or maybe your sleep paralysis demon has come to sit on your chest
while you lie next to someone perfectly lovely, in a life that looks, on paper, completely reasonable, but all you can hear is
this is not it, this is not it, THIS IS NOT IT.
sneak out like a cat who only came here to be fed on a cold dark night.
Hard to decipher which one at which time, see?
The whisper is harder to hear but more important to listen to.
It’s what tugs at you in other people’s art,
and in the novels and poems that make you cry.
It beckons to you from the pulpit at church when the preacher was really doing his thing it hits you right in the feels.
The whisper that came from the trees you hugged in Hawaii
While you were on mushrooms and you were 110% communing with the their spindly roots.
That was your muse.
For so long you’ve told her to
hold on for a second - I need to clean the kitchen and watch 147 reels, can you come back tomorrow?
But tomorrow the rent is still due and you still haven’t payed those toll bills or gotten your windshield replaced and I think there’s a parking ticket lost somewhere under the driver’s seat.
And the muse is still waiting.
There I go, distracted again thinking of all the worldly things when my muse is knocking, whispering on the other side of the door for me to let her in, to look at her and let her inspire and delight and frankly see that she’s the only thing that matters.
The muse is the whisper that when ignored you start to believe that parking tickets and trips to the post office are all that life is really about. that buying another pair of shoes will release you from the white knuckled grips of desperation to stay sober and sane.
The voice is the enemy of the muse.
And it is very convincing, speaking to you in your own voice which is an unusually cruel reality built to keep you from hearing the muse.
The enemy said you were not good enough.
It said you were too much and also somehow not enough, simultaneously, which is extremely efficient as far as psychological damage goes.
It said someone else already did the thing and did it better,
which is technically true of everything that has ever been made and also completely irrelevant.
It said:
who are you to write,
to speak,
to perform,
to build the thing,
to say the thing,
to be the thing,
as if the answer to that question is supposed to be someone else’s name.
The enemy said wait until you’re ready.
And you waited, like a good girl.
It said wait until you have more money, more time, the credentials, the car,
a nicer apartment, a better sense of self, a therapist who finally fixes you.
Wait until the planet in your 10th house is out of retrograde or into it, or whatever it is…
Wait for one more year of healing, and a feeling of readiness that I can promise you, from personal experience, does not come.
It simply does not come.
Readiness is not a feeling.
Readiness is a story the enemy tells you so you stay small and undeserving of welcoming the muse into your heart.
And so you helped other people do the things you wanted to do,
which let you stay close to your inspiration without having to risk anything,
which is a very sophisticated form of self-abandonment and I say that with love because I have done it, I do it, I am doing it in some corner of my life right now even as I say this.
You became very good at recognizing the thing in other people.
You became a generous, insightful, thoughtful witness to other people’s courage.
You cried at their performances and bought their books and told them they were extraordinary.
Because they are.
And somewhere in the back of your throat, a lump was forming and usually it was tears but its also poetry in the same breath.
“If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you.”
As in: the uninhabited life will eat itself from the inside.
As in: the thing that loves you enough to torment you will keep tormenting you,
because it loves you that much,
because it has no other way to shake you and wake you,
because it would rather you hate it and create something than love it and disappear into a okay life.
When was the last time you got so deep into something that you looked up and four hours had passed and you forgot to check your phone?
When was the last time something happened, a song, a conversation, a stranger saying exactly the thing, a wrong turn that led exactly right, and you stood there with this stupid smile on your face and thought: okay, Muse, I’m listening.
Those are God winks. The tracks laid out fot you that you can follow (or not.)
Those are the footprints your inspiration leaves in the snow so you can find your way back when you get lost,
which you will,
which is part of it.
The enemy as I’ve been writing about is not really your enemy.
I know that is annoying to hear.
It feels better to identify the villain and give it a name.
To locate the problem in your childhood or your culture or the algorithm or the particular flavor of capitalism that has eaten our creativity and ability to dream.
This friction, though, is the muse.
And friction is not evil.
Friction is how you know you’re moving.
The river doesn’t resent the rocks.
The river forges it’s way to the ocean.
