Highs and lows.

We are a starving artist cliché, every one of us. All with mixed specialties, but the core of it is that we’re all broke.
We’re all miserable.
And not so secretly, we all like being miserable.

Helen said it the other night, “I am addicted to heartbreak.”
At sixteen, she ran off New Orleans, found her first love. He was 28, and would just disappear for days with no word. He’d show up four or five days later, strung out from a weeklong coke binge, and tell her he couldn’t live without her. He’d be back for awhile, before taking off again without saying anything.
Each time he left, she’d spend the week tearing the city apart trying to find him, panicking.
Later, near the end, she discovered he was turning tricks for rich men so that he could afford his lifestyle.
“He had been Tennessee William’s cabin boy when he was seventeen. He had all these love letters from him, signed ‘love, Tom’. Beautiful letters, the man could write a love letter.”

She referenced this story as proof that once you get introduced to that up and down rollercoaster of dramatic flares, you can’t let it go. And you spend your whole life repeating it.
It influences you. It pushes you to get all of it out of your system. It gives you a rush of edge.
And you can’t stop.
If you do stop, if you do find something healthy, someone healthy-
What do you write about? What do you paint? What makes you pick up the guitar and spill out your soul?
Isn’t that what art is? The inability to keep something inside anymore, so you try and create something that eases all the feelings in your chest. It’s just temporary; you can’t get rid of it indefinitely. But creating something relieves the pressure.

You create something that shows your insides to other people, who can look at it and relate to it. They can say “yes, know where you’re coming from. I identify. I identify with you.”

We are easily bored. When we’re bored, we walk away to find something better.
When we are heartbroken, we can be dramatic.
When we are upset, we can channel it.
When we are happy, we’re practically glowing and have the world at our feet.
We can pull in experiences, we can find new ones.

We can turn it into something beautiful, something uniquely ours, something that we file away to think about when we’re in a retirement home.

We like being an emotional rollercoaster.
What we can’t figure out, is how to be stable, and not lose our edges.

Or maybe we’re just all a bipolar fucking mess, and need anti-depressants.