Lighting Yourself on Fire for Fun and Profit

The delicious pain of writing and love.

Would you do the things you do if no one noticed?

If you weren’t paid, would you stay in your profession?

If your art had an audience of zero, would you continue to produce it?

There are days when I wonder what my answer to those questions really is.

Today, though, it’s a clear “yes.”

The (fear-tinged) joy of making things.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what “success” means.

When I compare myself to others who write online, it can be easy to feel like a failure.

I don’t have many subscribers. I haven’t figured out exactly what I’m doing with this publication, or exactly what it offers those who read it (if you’re one of them, I can’t thank you enough for sticking with me this far).

Each time I sit down to write one of these posts, I have little to no idea what to say or what’s on my mind.

But also: each time I sit down to write, knowing that I have committed to make this thing consistently, something comes. Because it has to.

I discover that my mind has been working behind the scenes, arranging bits and pieces into some kind of whole.

The burning fear of missing a deadline (even a self-imposed deadline) is more than enough to get those subsconscious systems — which appear to run on anxiety — working away.

And so, twice a week, in a small and unremarkable way: I am a success.

Sit down at a keyboard and open a vein.

When journalist Red Smith was asked, back in 1946, if creating a daily column was difficult, he replied,

Why no. You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.

It’s a potent image (often misattributed to Hemingway).

And it resonates because, if you’ve ever tried to write something — a column, a song, an essay, a love letter — you know that the effort can feel physically painful.

Then there’s the fact that, if it’s going to be real, your blood needs to be in it.

There’s real risk in writing something and putting it out into the world.

Even if no one’s going to read it. Even if it’s not going to make a sound.

Our blood is usually on the inside of our bodies. When we share our thoughts, though, it’s as if we turn ourselves inside out.

Love is a burning flame.

The other thing you can’t have without vulnerability is love.

You can’t love other people unless you show them your throat, naked and unprotected, and place a knife in their hands and tell them “it’s up to you.”

You can’t love yourself unless you’re willing to face your tenderest parts and embrace them, even though they are so raw and sensitive that it hurts like hell.

It can feel like lighting yourself on fire.

Saying the words.

Rendering yourself powerless by giving another, or another part of yourself, the tools they could use to destroy you.

But the firelight also renders the world much more beautiful.

Light your own fire.

Whatever it is you most want to make and give to other people — or perhaps most fear making — you should.

It’s easy to avoid the pain and burning of vulnerability, the acid risk of failure, the dangers of shame and embarrassment.

Without them, though, life loses all its flavour.

I’d rather write badly than write nothing. I’d rather love clumsily than not at all.

If you feel the same, let’s get together and warm ourselves by the fire.