When will you be ready?

"2 AM and I'm still awake, writing a song
If I get it all down on paper, it's no longer inside of me
Threatening the life it belongs to
And I feel like I'm naked in front of the crowd
'Cause these words are my diary, screaming out loud
And I know that you'll use them, however you want to"
~Anna Nalick

There is something of a terrified exhibitionist in every writer. There is some twisted, fucked-up desire to purge the deepest, darkest places in ourselves and in all of us. Artists are canaries in coal mines...the most sensitive, frightened and fragile among us. What is it that causes people to want to strip themselves naked in front of people...people who can use the page or the screen as a way of emotionally distancing themselves from the artist long enough to have no conscience in tearing them to shreds? What the fuck kind of tormented life have we chosen? Or what the fuck kind of tormented life has chosen us?

If you have ever woken up in the middle of the night with the need, as close as breathing, to write something down or you'll explode, you will understand. The need to paint with words. The need to get it out or you will die, at the very least, a metaphorical death.

Somewhere, a while back, I decided to run from this part of myself. Because it always loomed large...this huge elephant in the room, staring at me with its eyes penetrating me and causing me to sweat in the heat of its truth. I ran until I could run no more and the elephant sits beside me now, staring into my soul and reminding me of the choices I made a very long time ago.

It hasn't mattered the number of disguises I have chosen to divert this elephant...it always knows me. It doesn't care that I am afraid. It doesn't care that I could fail. It doesn't care that the critics that hunt me could find me. It just stares at me. Unrelenting. I squirm under its gaze.

This beautiful woman I work with saw the elephant in the room...not everybody does. She prayed for someone to come and write her screenplay, because her voice, although eloquent, doesn't match the need in her piece. Mine does. And I know it does. She knows it does. And like in so many dreams I am frozen to the spot and I can't run.

I am big into messages from the Universe in ordinary places like transit systems. Of late, I step on a streetcar or a subway and I am assailed with one message. On a really annoying ad. It says, "When will you be ready?" Everywhere I turn, it screams at me, "WHEN WILL YOU BE READY?"

One of my clients, rather infamous for his thoughts on creativity, was going on at me the other day, once again, to pick up my bloody pen. His gaze pierced my armour and he said, "When will you be ready?"

Fuck you, you bastard elephant! Now. Ok? Now! Now, please stop shitting in my room!