The Art Of The Tinted Glasses
I am, by every measurable standard, in my most creative era. I've learned graffiti. Samantha is teaching me how to paint. I performed an 18th-century minuet and got encouraged to audition for Bridgerton. I brought two creative works to life for the senior dance concert. The podcast keeps building.
By every measurable standard, I am thriving.
I am also, quietly, a little lost.
Apparently, artists are supposed to feel this way. We sit between chaos and order. We experience the chaos so we can translate it into something the rest of the world can hold, can digest, can call wisdom. That's the bargain. That's what I'm starting to understand: it costs.
Which is probably why I cannot stop thinking about Bieberchella. Or about Michael Jackson, who has been everywhere again for the last two weeks. The world wasn't just reminded of great music. The world was reminded of the great souls behind it. Of what we have demanded and diminished out of them so we could have our art and entertainment.
We wanted the music. We did not want to think about who was making it, or who they had to be to make it. And when they offered it back to us anyway, their growth, their vulnerability, their chaos in a spotlight, we critiqued it like we knew ultimate order. They rose anyway. They always rise anyway. And then we covered it in fake chaos, because order doesn't make headlines. Only the music that comes from it does. The truth of the person never makes the front page.
I am not Bieber. I am not Michael Jackson. I am a college junior watching the year end and feeling something I did not expect: not excitement for summer, but pure terror that so many of the people I love are leaving. (One of the not-so-cool parts of having a lot of friends who are older.) I want to be present. I want to enjoy every second. I am also, from the frontier of understanding, crippled by knowing this is not peaking, not exactly at least; the weird parts are going to evolve, but the good circumstances will never look exactly like this again.
College, when you actually look at it, is chaos. It's watching your girlfriends (supermodels, superintelligent, superstars) talk in a shitty bar with ear-bleeding music to guys in togas trying to guess what sorority you might be in. It's catching someone on the deep slide from funny drunk to a serious case of a bone that’s about to break. It's knowing, from the frontier, that this is so bad and such pure chaos, and also that the order underneath it all will never look like this again.
So here is what I think I am trying to tell myself.
Life is going to bring you moments and people that make everything and everyone look good. The rose colored glasses are smart and bulletproof. They are not naive. They are choosing to see the pink while it is pink, which is its own kind of intelligence.
Life is also going to bring you the uncomfortable, awkward, ugly moments where you put on the black-tinted sunglasses to try to look cool at least while you judge.
But only one of those turns chaos into order. Only one of those makes art.
So, talking to me to talk to you as well: the next time you don't feel like buying into the cool shades and want to keep the cute ones, remember there will be a season of your life so pink that all you wish for is the black and white. The contrast. The picture-perfect cookie-cutter white picket fence. And remember: you can always go make art, but you can’t go back to college (just cried), so yeah, just let that truly sink in.