Art is a universal release and it comes in several shapes and forms. Whether it is through ink or paint, it is its own kind of therapy, and it's origins are never limited. That’s the beauty of art, it can come from all different places, but the most common of all is pain, anger, and the past. It’s where we dust off all of our cracked bones and clean up our old wounds. Artists are warriors of the past, of the faded years, of the ones who are stuck in moments that are still stealing our minutes, our seconds, our lives. In the process of creation, we lose ourselves in the dark pits of who we are, we are free to wander, to discover what made us, and see beyond what broke us. We may cover us in thick pieces of armors to protect us from the wars that destroyed us in the beginning, but we never look deep into who we are until the lines start to blur between what we thought we were, and what others see us as.

That is another beautiful thing about art; we can release all the sadness in us, all the darkness that flowed through us with no hope of light or redemption, without judgement, because if anything, art does not have to be seen, it can be kept quiet; it can be private. Not everyone can see the art many carry in their hearts or in their souls because they are so far buried in the blackness monsters have left them into wander for the rest of forever. We don’t have to be alone, we don’t have to be angry or lost in the scars others left on us, we don’t have to wonder why we deserve those battle wounds, why we weren’t enough for our loved ones to say, in the process of creation, in the moments of being some kind of god in the seconds of art and self-construction, we don’t have to be the dark shadows everyone avoids or hides behind, we can be ourselves, for better or worse and the only judge we’d have to face is the one we are most afraid of in the end: ourselves.

In my moments of art; of creation, I am far away from reality. I can become any hero or God I need to be, to keep my story or myths going. I can be a myth myself if I so wish it. The world is in my hands, and the only one who hold the mighty pen to the end of my story is me, and no one else. In the messy blue or red stained lines of ink that run like wrecked rivers along a page or a blinking laptop screen, I am a bird with wings, I am free from my pain, I am no longer sinking in the mess a boy made of me, but in the castle, in the masterpiece I made of myself in his destructive wake. I am not who I was with him, I am not the beauty to his beast, but a beauty/ star-struck wonder who found and modified herself into a beast of beauty, because that’s the amazement of pain, as long you learn from it, it can only make you stronger, instead of weak.

That’s what I never understood about people.

We are always afraid of pain, and although I understand it is a feeling of self-destruction, and comes with years full of self-questioning, at the end of all the tears, of the mountains of tissue boxes, and sappy romance movies and empty boxes of chocolate, there is a reward at the end of it all, at the end of all the suffering, a kind of wisdom that can not be obtained any other way. It is a beautiful serendipity when you can finally look in the mirror, and see what a past love could not, true beauty, a wicked kind of art that inspired hurricanes, that woke up Gods and gave them ideas for tornados and world-ending storms. It is really no wonder why flooding storms are named after people because we have the kind of power in ourselves to rock and undo the world if we only chose to use it; to see it. We have all the power in the world to destroy the ugliness we choose to see in us, because we are too busy looking at others, comparing our bodies, our hearts, our minds to those who are nothing like us, and have different worlds and scars than the rest of us. We always love to compare ourselves to those we think are better than us, but what we refuse to see what is what makes us better than them; what differentiates us from the others; what makes us unique. If we keep wanting to be the same, then the world would be made up of nothing but black and white, the color gray would no longer exist in the scheme of hues.

Art can be a lot of people, it is never seen in the same way, everyone has a different kind of vision; a different kind of perspective. We are not all born with the same kind of eye, we see things the way we want to see them, not the other way around. Art chooses us, becomes us if only we let it. Whether it be from words, the strokes of a paint brush or shots from a well-spun film, art requires a kind of mind that can see in more than one way; in a way that is not limited to what society instructs or rules as acceptable, but is willing to defy such a tyrannic order and throw artificial peace into chaos. It’s a shame that people are stuck with the kind of sight that keeps them in only one world, and can not see beyond the hundreds that lay before them like stars. That is the beauty of art, we do not have to be like everyone else, because then our work would be just endless rows of black and whites, there would be no blazing sapphires, no consuming obsidians, or passionate reds that bleed from rose petals, we would all be nothing, but blank canvases waiting to be filled in by the same boring brush, with the same boring colors, with no character or soul.

Art is everything.

Art gives birth to originality, to individuality, to a hundred kinds of worlds we have yet to discover.

Art is what we are afraid to create in the midst of pain and that is when we are truly great, when our feelings become stories, become storms, become thunders that can breathe right off our pages, right off out screens, right off our chests, they become more than what we ever intended them to be. It can be scary sometimes because it means our nightmares are more than dreams, they become reality.