Evil is the only true embarassment
A Letter to the Artist Doubting their Art
I see you over there: Finally going to bed, filled with the particular unease of someone quite sensitive, wondering if your art is good enough.
I see you over there: Your index finger hovering over the “publish” button, courage draining from your body with each passing second. Keeping your ideas in scraps in a drawer, waiting for that perfect block of pristine, uninterrupted time that never seems to arrive. Never sharing your work with others, ingeniously skirting both criticism and encouragement. Never signing up for that class. Never teaching that class. Looking in the mirror everyday and seeing your perfectly unremarkable face staring back at you – wondering if you are even allowed to call yourself an artist, a sculptor, a poet, a gardener, a drag queen, a quilter, a designer at all.
I want you to know something: At this very moment, someone somewhere has the same level of creative talent that you do, and that person is using that talent for evil. Yes, evil. They are using their imagination to plot elaborate and ever crueler ways to kill children. Faster ways to cut down ancient trees. Sneakier ways to steal from their employees. While you delete your fourth draft of your weird ass romance novel (how’s it coming, by the way?), someone is typing up a policy to starve and deprive. While you fight with the knots in your knitting, someone is 3D-modeling an explosive. Someone somewhere is using their god-given creative gifts to make this hard world hurt more. (You? You are making a soufflé. And sure it’s not great, but I think we can all agree that even the worst soufflé is morally neutral). Someone alive right now is using their creativity to make death take longer. Or to make death instantaneous. Starting a cult. Improvising lies. Hindering people they don’t even know for sport. Daydreaming about how to turn marginalized people into monsters, and then writing books and making podcasts about the monsters. And I want you to know something about these people: They are not questioning themselves, their right to make things, or their right to unleash their art on the world. And they are certainly not embarrassed.
They should be. After all, being evil is the only truly embarrassing thing.
You apologize for your little sonnets, your silly jingles, your slip-ups on the frets, your missteps in the dance. You apologize for never having the time or energy to bring your ideas to life. (Capitalism is a thief. It’s not your fault.) You apologize for forgetting your lines, or for not putting enough glitter on your kid’s costume for the school play. They don’t apologize for anything. Not when the corners they’ve cut lead to destruction. Not when the rivers run dry. Not when the air fills with toxic dust. Not when they steal or maim or exploit.
I could not tell you whether what you make or what you have to say matters. Frankly, I don’t care. Your novel might be truly terrible. (Who’s to say?) Your acting might be bad. (Like, really bad.) Your collages might be—as you’ve always suspected—lousy, and your fan fiction might be derivative. But at least it’s not embarassing.
Thanks for reading! This piece was inspired by a quote I read from someone else. Unfortunately, this was a midnight toilet scroll kind of thing, so I lost track of who said it and what precisely they said. I am on a mission to track the quote down so I can attribute it and share it wildly. It was a great little blurb. I remember it was by a woman, possibly a writer. Possibly alive during the early twentieth century, but I can’t be sure. If you have come across a quote from a woman about not apologizing for your art because some people are using their creativity for war-mongering and evil, please let me know by responding to this e-mail or leaving a comment!
-Isabelle
Poignant and pointed. Let us add more glitter next time and make that morally neutral soufflé at last! Thank you for your encouragement to make imperfect art. Now I'm off to write a second-rate sonnet.