Passionpop

You know what I find amazing, how you can go through life skirting around, actually not skirting, skirting sounds too gleeful, I’d say more tripping and crawling around that very thing you want to do but have so much anxiety over you’d rather die a slow death avoiding it than seizing it to unscrew its head and slip yourself inside.

I mean, it is only another character isn’t just like the one you hate in yourself at the moment, so why not. Anyway, the power of all that anxiety and what it drives you to do to stay in avoidance I think is amazing.

And it’s funny, because even then you still don’t avoid your thing completely. Because after all you do have an Instagram following and you push stuff into galleries and you go sing at open mics and sneak out little recordings, hovering around yourself like a vulture to a carcass. And a carcass is quite fitting isn’t it. Lying there, compressed spine, leg nerves burning struggling to walk, unable to bend. You’ve ‘circled’ that thing you idolize to be, for what 19 years in construction? Saying ‘this is not me, ‘this vertebrae is not mine’. So why do you do it, slow cooked you and your dream on Instagram?

Is it the words that look like a poem that form an image that you paint over and over that conjure a song that carry those words that mean some meaning that is personally important, but seems indulgent, borderline self-victimizing.

So you look for the universal application. These themes are relatable aren’t they? Fear, security, welcome, belonging, safety. But if you lose the specifics, does your story still help anyone, are the feelings abstracted, distilled more potent?

And what’s driving it all, it must be reconciling those feelings you want fixed or trying to that is essentially at the core of your passionate project. So what, you’re trying to tell people you feel like this, to make them feel like them feeling like that too is ok? Or is it more how you had that negative feeling and found its positive antidote and tried to share how you did that.

Now monetize it.

It’s tricky isn’t it. Especially in the form of words that look like poems that turn to paintings that inspire songs. When everyone’s just calling you for a wall to be pulled down and a new bathroom put in. But the paintings do sell, don’t they. As for songs, you know they’re not going to be popular enough to get the hits that render you sustainable. Maybe mums right, why don’t you just hit the streets for some cold hard cash. As for the poems, who invests in poetry. Still, that’s not going to stop you from binding yours. Or from painting every free hour and releasing song after song after song. It’s funny isn’t it, all the doubt in the world, all the lack of belief in bucket loads to paint the sky black and yet you still live on hope and it still finds the cracks, time after time after time.

I’m passionate about paying my landlady rent, I can feel that passion in bucket loads every time her car pulls into the driveway in front of her garage I’m sleeping in. She said well you’ll just have to borrow won’t you. She’s funny. Off who exactly.

And as you leap and for a while become a nothing, when people say what do you do and you say you do experiments and therefore live in the consequentially-by-definition era of failure at the moment, and maybe that’s ok. Actually, not maybe, that is the only way. You’re a crack pot scientist cum chef trying to make something at the end of your bed that tastes and acts like the antidote to those feelings you said everyone has. And then you put that thing in a nice little package, a test tube if you like, acrylic so it doesn’t break in postage, and get it ready to replicate, and not in limited amounts either. Because you know what, you tell me where is the value of limiting the number of something if it was truly created to be of benefit.

@lysh_ashcroft