Outcreate

There's a song by The Lonely Forest called "Woe Is Me... I Am Ruined." Kind of an emo title, I know. But wait until you hear the lyrics from the chorus!

All I can do / is make others bleed / a prideful ego fire / I'm eager to feed / and they say I'm a good guy / and they say I'm a good guy

Yeah, real ooey gooey stuff there.

I've been feeling a lot like that lately. Like instead of the Midas touch I have a touch that turns everything to poison. That breaks it, or consumes it somehow. Or like the Shadowbrute in C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces: "some say the loving and the devouring are the same thing."

I don't know how to be close to people. I don't know how to let people in. I've never particularly understood some of the very basic things involved in being a Human Person Who Interacts With Other Human Persons. I can be selfish and small-minded. I hurt people. I mess up.

But it makes me sad how easily we give up on each other. How quick we are to say "here's a hurt that cannot be mended."

There's another song lyric I go to again and again. Maybe it should be the thing I get as a tattoo. It's from the Tori Amos song "Job's Coffin":

You must outcreate that destructive tendency

And that's the only thing I know how to do. When I hurt people. When I let them down. When they turn away from me and give up on me and I realize that maybe they're right about me -

All I can do is try to make stuff. Keep making stuff. New stories, new art, new music, whatever I can do to add things to this world. A feeble attempt to make up for all the things I've messed up and broken in my time here.