Pain Breeds Good Art

Today I felt horrible. I cried if that's any indication for you. Let me state that I'm not a big crier (I would say I cry a normal amount), so crying is usually fairly significant. I love to cry though! Especially when I'm feeling emotional. I will watch sad movies alone just to provoke tears. The lack of crying has to do with being detached from my emotions; so often I will feel anxious or depressed and literally have no idea what triggered it. How's that for some mental un-health? Yikes. Anyway, bad day.

As I was crying/laying in bed in the middle of the afternoon/praying, I heard myself utter aloud this phrase, "I'm sick of being sick." For the past few months I have woken up every morning (with a handful of exceptions) feeling sick to my stomach, panicked, short of breath, and completely dreading the next 14 hours that make up a day. Some days I make it out of this only scathed, other days I succumb to the dread. I know it's not normal to feel this way. I know I need professional help, which is why my therapist better prepare herself for an emotional vomiting in her office at high noon on Thursday. I hate feeling this way. I'm literally sick of being sick. (And I use the word literally in the correct sense, not the Rachel Zoe literally Brad I just died sense as she is not actually dead.)

Two weekends ago someone was praying for/with me and said, "God gives you the hard stuff because he loves you." I wanted to respond to that with a slew of cuss words aimed at that person and possibly God if that really is true of Him, but refrained. I thought about this idea today and pondered what good could He be trying to bring out of my pain? I didn't come to any conclusions but it brought to mind a lot of brilliant, but terribly unhappy artists. Everyone's been talking about Salinger lately. Is anyone surprised that he was a recluse? To be capable of writing about such angst I think one probably has to suffer similarly. Right now Daniel is reading Pulitzer Prize winning John Kennedy Toole who killed himself at age 32. Van Gogh cut off his freaking ear! What is it about depression that seems to foster art? It seems like happy people don't make good art. Happy people make crafts. Why does it seem like history's most prolific artists were tortured human beings? Do you have to hate yourself or your life in order to produce really beautiful work? It's a shame that these people create music, writing, and visual art that brings joy to so many and yet they remain unhappy and suffering.

This past fall and winter I couldn't stop listening to Bon Iver's For Emma album. Bon Iver derived from the French "bon hiver" meaning "good winter" seems like an oxymoron, but falls in line with exactly what I'm talking about...beauty birthed out of pain and lack of life. Most of you have probably poured over the album like I have and know that For Emma is at the same time hauntingly beautiful and depressing. The album was created out of a break up and in the midst of mono. Recorded in a lonely cabin in the dead of a Wisconsin winter. I'm getting depressed just thinking about the set up. Who records good music while suffering from mono? He does. In fact it's some of the most beautiful art I've ever experienced. Maybe that's because I resonate with pain even when it's expressed abstractly through chord progressions, falsetto, and the silence between notes. Isn't it a great album? Isn't it art at its best?

I don't think it'd be worth wanting to cut my ear off just to create something beautiful. I really need to see God working this painful anxiety into something good like it says He will in Romans 8:28 or else He needs to help me get rid of it for good. I'm sick of lacking serotonin levels being the cross I have to bear.

Not sure I can end this post tied up with a pretty bow, so I'll leave you with this video of Bon Iver singing a cappella in a Paris hallway. When the camera pans to show the small crowd gathered I see a glimpse into heaven. I can't explain why. It's just so beautiful it hurts. Maybe it's beautiful because it hurts.