Why do I create?

Why do I create? Why would I spend two years of my life refining a website that no one asked for, that will only cost me money to run, and that time will one day swallow without a sound?

Like every answer I give, it’s long winded, and I’ll find a way to tie it back to my childhood.

When I was in middle school, the first girl I ever loved began to open my eyes to everything I had never questioned about myself and the way I was raised. Her name was Lucy. Christianity made no logical sense, and I had never once examined it. I was taught that questioning religion was the devil's trick, that if I fell for it, I would burn in hell. I was always curious, but more than curious, I was afraid. Understanding seemed a poor trade for eternal damnation, and I was not willing to gamble.

There I was, twelve, awkward and insufferable, and, like nearly every time I have changed since, it started with a pretty girl who saw past the naïve boy in front of her. She saw not who I was but who I could become. I was too young to know better and curious enough to change anyway. Whether she meant to or not, Lucy sits at the root of most of what I am today. Follow almost any branch of me down far enough and you find her.

Lucy never told me whether I should stay religious. She only told me to think about why I was. It was idiotic to base your life around a concept you had never stopped to question. So simple, but to me at the time, was as foreign as a concept could get.

I started reading, obsessively, everything I could find online about why people stayed in their religion or left it. I devoured it. I never went looking for facts. Surely nothing on the internet could settle, once and for all, whether Christianity was real or false. What I could do was listen to people who had wrestled with it for far longer than I had, people far wiser than me, and hear what they had made of the struggle.

A month or so passed, and I realized I already knew what I believed. I was just too scared to admit it. Still afraid of punishment, I pulled away by degrees, the way you back out of a room without turning your back on whatever is inside it. First, I stopped reading scripture. Then I prayed once a week instead of every night. Then, eventually, not at all.

Even after I had given up every habit and practice, I couldn't say it out loud to anyone. What if saying it aloud meant I could never take it back? What if I lay on my deathbed one day, turned away from heaven over a sentence I said at twelve?

That fear didn't last. I have always loved to talk.

Losing my faith left a hole, and into it fell a question I had never been confronted with: well then, what's the fucking point? Why should I care about anything? I would die one day, and shortly after, I would be forgotten. That didn't frighten me. It left me apathetic toward the world around me. Everything drained to grey, and the only color that survived the draining was a worrying one: red. These weren't the rose-tinted glasses the movies talk about. What little feeling I could still muster came out as anger. I was already self-conscious, swimming in hormones I didn't understand, and now I had no purpose to anchor any of it. I sank. Smiles and laughs grew fewer and farther between.

I struggle with this to this day. I don't feel big emotions anymore. Good, bad, infuriating, delightful, and everything in between, all of it lands with the same faint, polite flicker you would feel at a B+ on a test you expected a B- on, or the reverse.

Searching for any way to feel again, I did what I always seem to do and lucked into a woman smarter than me, who guided me along. Lucy introduced me to poetry. I liked her voice, and I liked it even more when she read poetry aloud. Some poems, not all, were followed by small discussions about what we loved and what we didn't. Finally, a spark had been lit again. The coals of my soul, ones I thought had gone cold, were met with the oxygen of Lucy's breath, and caught fire on the pages we read, the first flame I had felt in as long as I could remember.

One book led to two, then to ten. Before I knew it, my social media was nothing but poetry. These authors wielded words in ways I would never have thought of until my eyes were opened. Their metaphors joined ideas and feelings that, before poetry, had lived in separate rooms of my mind, and the walls came down.

A phrase I heard a few years back, and I'm embarrassed to say where, is how I explain my fascination: "Poetry is the most economical form of language." It is why poetry called to me even at that age. The fewest possible words, the biggest possible emotion. For a boy bankrupt of feeling, a language that spent so little and bought so much was irresistible. I remain envious of those capable of portraying their perspectives laid bare so elegantly. Capable of securing returns that the elite would commit more heinous crimes than they already do to achieve.

I finally had a purpose again. I had resigned myself to the loss of my ability to care about anything, and this slapped me awake. I struggle to feel my emotions every single week of my life, but I know that art will always be the road back to my soul. My emotions might be absent most days, but this I now know, they can always drop by for a visit, like an old friend you missed, but didn’t realize how much until they stood in front of you.

It was the beginning of the rest of my life. Consuming art and learning the emotions that powered it became a drug, and I needed it the way you need anything that gives you access to a part of yourself you long believed was dead. The love didn't stop at poetry. It spread, hungrily, to makeup, fashion, animation, music, painting, drawing, photography, videography, modern art, experimental art, and a much longer list that I hope never stops growing.

I had been handed a direct line to my emotions, but that still didn't answer what began this multi-year spiral. What's the point?

My purpose is clear to me now: to create, and to hand others even a portion of the help I so desperately needed. I want to learn as many art forms as I can and use them to connect someone to themselves, or to one another. The more I create, the more reasons I find to believe it is the most valuable thing I can do with my life. Art can turn the world's eyes toward the inequalities and atrocities that plague it. It can carry stories, feelings, thoughts, and awareness of heavy subjects to the people willing to let art into their souls. I could spend pages listing the reasons I have learned, through the process, that creating matters. None of them answers the question.

Why do I create?

It is my attempt to give others what I cannot give myself. The ability to feel.