If experience is not turned into text, it does not even become the past.
Slava KPSS, Russian rapper.
Last week I shared a victory — so it feels dishonest not to share my failures as well. I think that on average I am a more self-aware person than most. I find it fairly easy to separate my value from other people’s assessments of me and my actions, I know how to acknowledge the inevitability of pain, and so on, and so forth. This is the same approach I try to promote in my creative work — and all the more important, then, is to reflect local breakdowns in that work, because otherwise I end up portraying myself as some kind of superhuman.
On Sunday, December 14, I was walking down the street and found myself thinking that my romantic life in recent years has not exactly been rich in stories. I won’t go into the reasons why: this text is not about that. And yet I felt so bitter, so bleak — that when I got home, I sat down on the couch and cried. I’m lying. I lay down on the couch and cried. And I’m lying again. I started crying before I even got home. I felt like a complete loser, incapable of sparking romantic interest in anyone — which, of course, is catastrophizing, overgeneralization, and plain mean-spirited self-flagellation.
Ninety-nine percent of the time I catch such thoughts and don’t let them defeat me; I transform signals of pain into creative and constructive energy: for example, this summer I realized that I had obviously neglected my appearance — and instead of calling myself tasteless, I happily rebuilt my wardrobe. But there is also this nasty one percent that turns successful Mikhail into a small, crying Misha, who feels as if the whole world has turned its back on him.
I believe that stories like this really matter to people — so that each of us understands that we are not alone in our vulnerabilities. And for me, this kind of creative reworking of my own experience is deeply therapeutic, because if my story can help someone, then that pain was not in vain. As the saying goes, if our gods are offered SUCH sacrifices, they must be real!
And that is how creativity, processed out of pain, comes into being, and in the end I can say just one thing, citing Slava KPSS again:
Gorky
would not have accepted me into the Writers’ Union,
because behind every person there is a biography.