Outlet

‘What inspires you to write such beautiful stuff?’ asked a friend of mine after reading a piece of my writing yesterday. I said, ‘I just wrote pretty much what I felt, I wrote it down because it hurt’.

The conversation got me thinking about why pain makes way for beautiful art. Not that happiness is never the subject of artistic curiosity but pain often comes with its own charm, especially when it comes to art. As much as we all want to consume feel-good content, haven’t we all longed at some point to dwell into Plath’s and Woolf’s heartbreakingly beautiful words? I wonder why anything that is painful can give birth to something so beautiful.

I guess, the answer lies in the way we deal with hurt, pain and every other unpleasant emotion. We never want to part ways with happiness. But with pain and remorse and sadness we always seek a way out. We want to feel anything but pain in that moment. We seek myriad ways of not feeling such unpleasant emotions. Some of us try to make sense of it by looking for answers and some of us try to find an escape route. I guess, in this quest, our pain, sorrow, and sadness ultimately take another form. It gets sculpted into beautiful poetry, captivating songs and stories that make our hearts skip a beat.

With happiness, we never want to leave that moment. We feel complete in that phase and if anything, we never want to part ways with that feeling. Why will we then want to give it any other shape or let alone find a way out of it?

When we try to escape from somewhere, we often land up in unknown terrain. So, when we try to escape pain, we end up in between enchanting prose of poetry, soulful strings of music or any other world that is called art. In happiness, we thrive but in pain, we just try to survive. Our survival mechanisms are ways to sustain, to stay alive. And our art is certainly one of the strongest forces that keep us alive. After all even Robin Williams pointed out in Dead Poets Society that ‘Poetry, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for’.

So, I called up my friend and answered his question about my writing. My writing is, of course, an outlet for anything and everything, good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant. But I write more often when I hurt because even though happiness brings us home, pain and sadness take us places.