late night musings

The other night I lay in bed, simply overcome with thoughts. I almost got up and turned my computer back on to start writing then… but I was afraid that would ruin whatever train of thought I had going. So I settled by writing some of it down on my phone and saving it to be reexamined later.

My eyes burn with sleep that won't come
My mind yearns for the past 

And I wonder are all artistic people tortured? Is this a normal part of Artistic life?* This feeling of muchness? Too great, too terrible, too beautiful, too MUCH. There is this enormity of all of my feelings. As if everything that I can experience is too large to truly behold.

And I try to convince myself that the artistic part of me is not dead. That I can be artistic in other ways. That maybe they can be just as meaningful. Because you can't go back to what you used to be. That my sense of my artistic self is not a loss. That I'm not lost.

I'm not scared that I lost the person I used to be. I'm scared that I lost the person I could have become. The persons I could have become. The multiple versions of myself that were waiting for me once upon a time. Isn’t that the hardest part of deciding what to do with your life? Letting go of the things that you could have been? As if by choosing one path I must say goodbye to all the others that I could have taken. I know this isn’t a new question, heck “The road less travelled” is basically this question in poem form, but still isn’t it a valid question?

How do we reconcile this loss of what we could become? How do you ever decide that the path you’ve chosen is the right one when all the other paths call to you almost as loudly?

I don’t have many answers; mostly just questions that keep me awake at night. Questions that bubble back up when everything around me is quiet.

*I accidentally capitalized artistic on my phone… but I think its kind of nice, so I’ll leave it