There’s no rational explanation for why I want to make art
(This post was written and published as an exercise during a meeting of IndieWeb Club Bangalore.)
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had this compulsion to make things. I start to get physically uncomfortable if I go too long without working on a creative project.
These days, making something means writing short fiction or blog posts. But at different times of my life it has meant different things: programming, producing music, cooking, or learning a musical instrument.
My need to always have a creative project simmering on the burner is so strong that, at times, it has had a negative effect on my mental and physical health. If I’m kept away from my creative tools for too long — because of travel, work obligations, illness, or technical failure — I become agitated and short-tempered. I start resenting myself and the people around me, holding tension in all the muscles in my body in a way that causes me actual physical pain.
Years ago, around the time the pandemic hit, I started therapy. One of the questions my therapist asked me in our early sessions was why I wanted so badly to work on creative projects even though they were actively causing me mental anguish. This was a time when I had not yet learned to have a healthy relationship with my work, so I would often hyperfocus on creative projects until I burned out or got too frustrated to finish them.
Nobody had asked me this question before. I had never even asked myself this question. I spent the next few months trying to come up with a satisfactory answer, some kind of mission statement, some guiding principle for the work I cared so much about.
But no matter how much I thought about it, no matter how many pages I filled in my journal, no matter how many friends I talked to, I could not find an answer that would satisfy me.
Was I writing to educate? To entertain? To comfort people? Was my creative work an act of service to humanity? Was I doing it because I wanted to be cool, to make money, to be famous? To get laid? No single answer seemed like it was a good enough reason to spend myself in the way I was doing.
And now, five years later, five years that have felt like several lifetimes, I believe that there is no good rational reason to make art. Rationalizing why it’s important for me to make art is like rationalizing why a flower is beautiful, or why a kitten is cute. They just … are???
I don’t doubt that somebody smarter, wiser, more articulate than me could explain these phenomena. Maybe that somebody will be myself, ten years from now.
But today, all I can say is: I make art because I’m compelled to make art. There is some inexplicable force inside my being that brings me to my desk, day after day, week after week, year after year, and drives me to tap out these words you’re reading right now.
And that’s okay! I’m made peace with the fact that my own motivations are a complete mystery to me. Not everything needs to have a clear scientific explanation backed by data and experimental evidence. So much of our human experience is about not knowing, never knowing, the full extent of who we are and what drives us. So much of our actions are guided by forces that seem almost supernatural.
Answering the question of why I want to make art is like answering the question of why I love.
I just do. And that’s all there is to it.