You overcome the past by filtering your pain through the consciousness of God, turning it into art, and serving it to the world. Simple but difficult. Shame and fear are easier. Punishing yourself for your mangled emotional adaptations necessary to survive is second nature. It takes little effort to add up all your mistakes and measure your value by them. But you can’t make life worth living if you refuse to triumph over emotional darkness. To waste your past by shaming yourself for it is selfish. It does nothing but permit you to stay the same.
Secrets suffocate more souls than anything else. Humanity needs your imperfection. Your challenges. The worst days of your life. The abuses. The abandonments. The neglect. Your failed attempts to trust and connect. Your theft. Your lies. Your internal and external violence. Your dysmorphia. Your unconsciousness. Your obsessive compulsions. It is your cosmic responsibility to use them for the good of another. The spiritual universe wastes nothing. Without these raw materials, you won’t be able to free yourself or anyone else. You and they will remain under the tyranny of teeny tiny versions of yourselves.
You heal when you realize you are not alone in any experience you’ve ever had. When you hear another person talk of pain like yours, you are set free from emotional prison. And your history burns the padlock off someone else’s cell. Both are unbound when two or more gather and expose their truths without fearful protection. Your experience of reality changes from darkness to light. You can’t make that transition without direct, honest knowledge of another.
If you find yourself under a scorching volcanic mountain of debt, lies, houses, delusions, products, filters, drugs, sex, and pretenses – start there. Time and effort can clear any amount of wreckage. It’s dirty. It’s painstaking. The truth rips your guts out. It’s also prayer. It’s a service so deep and wide it will matter more than anything else you do. The heart of your art will never be the same. Your burden is your responsibility. Start digging. Translate your soul. Overcome.
Your creative inclinations are God’s treatment plan. You have the directive. There is no later. There is only now. Everything else is nonsense. Gameplay. When contemplating the truth of his life in the face of death, Marcus Aurelius said, “Act as if this life is your second shot and live it that way.” Bringing the awareness of death to mind spurs your soul to rebirth into its unending possibility. Face yourself. Live out a redemption story. The extent of good you can do in the world correlates to your ability to let mistakes change you for the better.
If God is in the heart of one man, then God is in us all. People are in desperate need of the testimony your brokenhearted life creates. Your freedom and their lives depend on it.
Quote: What is love if not the gift of being seen for who one is? Mark Nepo
Song Accompaniment: Stand Up, Jazmine Sullivan
Artwork: The Art of Seth
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