One thing scares the living daylights out of my soul as a creator, and that’s being okay. Or having my work described as “average”, or “nice”, or with such other platitudes.
It might as well be unimportant, insignificant, worthless. It might as well be discarded—or better yet, never been made—if it isn’t something another soul would either love or hate violently.
Either everything within you says “Yes.” Or everything says “No.”
“Okay” is the kiss of death, for it signifies more than that what I’ve created can be overlooked or nodded away; it means that I have failed in creating art, I have failed to communicate to another being, I have failed in being honest with myself through my medium, I have failed to love with the kind of love that overcomes fear.
For that is where the seed of creativity emerges—at the intersection between love and truth.
The result is beauty—beauty in the form of a soul who would not sell itself to conventionality, the popular trend, the dollar. Beauty in the honesty of a man or woman who seeks to understand themselves and the world around them for what they simply and truly are, often afraid of what they’d find, but the love of truth constraining them notwithstanding. Beauty in the power of creation under the constant shadow of death and destruction.
So complete an honesty, so full a love, so thrilling a sense of aliveness pulsating through a song, a poem, a sketch, a novel that no person, not even the artist herself, can be numb before its beauty.
Better to be hated by many, and loved by few.
Better this, than to be okay.