Whether or not we know it, we all have a portion of ourselves that strives to be recognized as as someone important. If you look at anyone, those who create, support, teach or heal, you’ll find at one point or another that they've had someone they looked up to and someone who excelled in their specific field. Just as a child looks up to their parent, for a certain time in their life they think so highly of them that they imitate them, and we all know of a child who is so eager to grow up. That being said, it seems to me that artists do the same. In my experience with attempting to write poems and lyrics, I find that my style would change from time to time, and I may have figured out why. Through poetry, I read multiple different artists’ work, and through music, I am constantly listening to new tracks. When I write I always want it to be my next best work and in doing so, I remember certain traits of other piece’s that I had fallen in love with and attempt to use the same technique in my own work. If I’d been listening to a great hip hop artist, I would try to write on a similar beat, or with a similar tone. But in doing that, I realized that whether or not I knew it, I was trying to become a clone of that artist. I’d held on tight to the metaphors of Neil Hilborn’s poetry, the backstory behind Eminem, and the passion of NF, but in the end I’d lost sight of why I wanted to learn music and why I'd started writing, and my overbearing desire to be someone successful and important took it’s place.
That desire is what forces artists to be who they're not, and that is why it is crucial not to aim for an impeccable success, but rather to make yourself satisfied with your own work. Most artists are never completely satisfied with their own work, but those are the artists who succeed because they work on the art for the sake of the art, and not for money or fame or glory. As writers, why do we read and write? It's because we have a passion for the word, and we have stories to tell, metaphors to unleash and love to shed. It's because of everything that passes through our minds and our hearts, it's to let out the toxins from our spirit. Writing helps us live, it helps remind us why we live, and what for. It helps us think differently, and see things from new and more vibrant perspectives. We do it because we want to and we do it because we love to.
We write because it's a passion and we write because it heals. We write because of everything we see and everything we feel because everything we know is far too real to hold inside. We write because we're in love with speech and analogies. We write because it's our own, and we write to give back and we write in the honor of Christ. As long as we don't focus on money or fame, as long as we stay tuned in to our hearts and what we love to do, and why we do it, we will find that being important will not be all that important.
