When I'm sad I eat, When I'm happy I eat?

I was thinking about the whole "art imitating life or life imitating art" issue the other day--and I thought I had it all worked out in my head until I saw Rod's blog. The actual paragraph that made me think was this:

"I read recently, as I was studying up on creativity, on where it comes from and how to wrap your arms around it and welcome it into your spirit, that it's nearly impossible to be creative if you're not happy. This struck me as being very true. If your energy is tightly focused on how cluttered your desk is, or how sleepy you are, or how you never get any time for yourself, it won't be delightfully, wonderfully, frighteningly open. It is the openness that allows the fragments of images and words to merge into a new idea. You cannot be open if you are not happy."

I'm the complete opposite: some of my best writing has come from my darkest hours. My best work to date is an assignment I knew I couldn't finish to my liking on time, and my suicide note. Oh calm down, it was a long time ago. In fact, every time I read it, that thing makes me laugh. I was so angry with the world and life that I wrote things that I knew would cut to the heart of everyone I addressed. I'm not afraid to admit that it was a damn good piece of writing. I wrote it to make an impact. In fact, I make make it into a book some day. Wouldn't that be morbid...but oh so funny?

Anyway, I thought tortured writers were the norm until I read Rod's post. I even thought that maybe artists made art because we were the only people who saw the world for what it really was. Our art was our way of escaping. While scientific people called artists dreamers, it was actually them who lived in the fantasy world.

Think about it; They don't call them "starving artists" for nothing. Because artistry isn't mainstream, we can't get jobs that pay enough to support our passion. We could never call our art our job, only our hobby. Very few of us will ever be successful enough to say we are artists, not "entry level workers with a very creative mind." At best we will become successful only after we die.

So we live our lives, trying everyday to escape the painful real world. We hope for the best, knowing we'll have the worst. If only we could all marry rich. That would solve a lot of our problems!

And who knows; Maybe it's just me!