speechless

[prismaticbleed]

I just realized that the reason why I can't seem to even force myself to draw anymore is because I've been doing it all digitally.
When I draw digitally, there are two very large problems facing me: one, it is terribly intimidating. I have no idea how to accomplish the feel or colors or look I want when I use digital media, as everything turns from visual tools to tiny icons and menus. Plus large canvas sizes confuse me badly, as I cannot see the whole thing at once and it plays havoc with my perception.
The second problem is the lethal one, though. When I draw digitally... it feels completely cold, separate, alien. I have to work through a tablet and watch my work on a screen. There's a visual disconnect, unavoidably, but the disconnect that gets me is the physical one.
I think it's also why it's been getting progressively more difficult for me to compose music digitally. When I create... I am a part of what I am creating. There is no divide between me and my work. So taking that away from me, and putting my work in a computer, is leaving me sitting here and staring in desperation, completely unaware and unable of how to get the swirling imagination inside of me into a machine.
But I can't seem to create much better with paper or pianos, either. Sure, there is a definite improvement, as I can melt into the pencils and the keys, but the translation is imperfect. I try to draw what I feel and see, I try to compose what I hear and experience... I can't. I just can't. My hands won't move that way, my fingers can't speak that language.

My entire life seems to consist of strange, sparkling, silent things. I don't like to talk because spoken word is never accurate or honest enough. But I need to talk, and I need to write, because it's the only way I can communicate in this world.
I want to just sit at a typewriter and bleed, like Ernest Hemingway said. I want to do that so desperately. I thought I knew how, and it's why I've been writing for my entire life, but... but all I'm doing is trying to narrate what I already know. And 'know' is the only way to describe it.
The stories I write... I see them, I hear them, I feel them... but even those are only senses, and none of them can ever hope to explain what it feels like to have that story absolutely running through me, defining me, becoming me. When I write I am not a writer. I am a channel. That's it. And so in a sense I do bleed... but my blood makes strange splotches on the paper, illegible to most, and understandable only outside of understanding.
It's so ridiculous, how even now I don't even know what to type. I know exactly what I want to say, and how to say it... but I don't speak this language. Not very well, at least.
It's why I am most clear in symbolism, and metaphors, and vague dreamlike descriptions. That sounds a little more familiar, a little more like everything and nothing at all...

When I draw or compose, it's the exact same thing.
I feel the music, and it turns me into an instrument, an entire symphony... then I sit down in front of a computer, or a piano, and suddenly I am scared and heartbroken, because how do you play a feeling? How do you transcribe a knowing into MIDI format, for heaven's sakes? I don't know if you can. You can try, like I have been trying for years, and maybe you can even come close... but after a while it just makes me ache, and I am left distraught and quiet, with every note inaudibly ringing in my ears.
I feel the art, and it turns me into something I cannot describe... and that is why art is the hardest language of all to translate. For me to draw feels like I'm twisting ink and graphite and paint into life, like I'm turning paper into a mirror, a reflection of something far more true than lines on a page. It's beyond words. But... I can't do it right. More often than not, I spend hours staring at a blank canvas and wanting to cry, because once again, where do I even start? A good deal of it is lack of training, lack of understanding, lack of skill... this I know. And yet, I could be the most accomplished artist in the world, and still be unable to say what I wanted through my work. It's almost sick.

I can't seem to speak in words anymore.
Chaos wonders why I always repeat the same words to him, over and over, every day. I say that I love him, thousands of times. He asks why and I reply that I am trying, with my entire heart, to say it correctly, but words don't work.
And at the end of the night I find myself drowning in silence and speaking with how I feel and that is the only thing that works.
You can't put that into words. You can't even think about it. It's too true.
You can't take chaos and categorize it. You can't take love and label it.
You can't take creativity, imagination, and understanding, and put them into boxes and graphs and neat little rows.
If you do that, you kill the truth behind them.
But the language of this world seems to do that whether I like it or not, and it's breaking my heart at this point.

Why is everything that means anything to me so immaterial and quiet?
Why is anything that means everything to me so dreamlike and otherworldly?
They laugh at people like me, here. They call people like me crazy, stupid, foolish, a mistake. People look at me like a flaw in the world, like a defect, like an unwanted glitch in the otherwise unchanging and unfeeling program they run on.
But there are so many people like me, here. I think we have the right idea. So why is it so difficult to be this way?

In any case I still want to create.
I was able to create, as a child. So I somehow knew how to speak more clearly then.
Maybe now I'm trying too hard to speak too languages at once.
"Draw, write, compose, but do it exactly as we tell you to."
I think that damaged something in me, badly. I need to fix it. I can, if only I can figure out how.
I miss being able to speak my native language.
Maybe I just need to force it for a while, but that hurts so much, to keep getting the words wrong, and I'm so tired of it...
Maybe I'm trying too hard to communicate something that just can't be communicated, not like this.

But then I'm left unmoving, unspeaking, and blissful. I'm left completely detached, drowning in this creativity, not a care in the world.
I could live like that. I would.
But I want to share this with people. I have to. I cannot keep this to myself.
Do they even speak this language? People tell me that doesn't matter, but how could that be true? Too much creativity here has become cold and dead... I could never even think of dulling mine. It is a terrible thought. I want to teach this language to others. I just don't know how.

I feel like I'm complaining far too much, so I'm going to end this entry here.