I have been in creative stasis as of late, and in between moments of perceived clarity and bouts of creative re-/su-/ex-pression, I always seem to come up with an answer in the form of a piece of Internet. I didn’t come up with what I had originally intended; however, I do come prepared for this month’s theme with some ideas  that we could play around with.

Lately I’ve been thinking of this generation’s current iteration. I say iteration in the sense that people (individual iterations) continually repeat a process with the aim of approaching a desired goal or target or result (renaissance included). The result of which is the overload of seemingly superfluous interests, ideas, mindsets, and worldviews. And this is not a bad thing. What I propose is nothing new, but a reiteration, of something that has been handed down from generation to generation and told from parent to child. Something that seems to be often forgotten in my home environment; something so easily often unnoticed and neglected today. 

The proposal in question?  Believing in yourself.

Puns withstanding, everything can be done in a .gif. A remix here, a rehash there and you’ve got your brand new hot Tuesday release with all the refixin’s. Observable from our day to day, humans’ ever-expanding and self-perceived knowledge of everything will perpetually fight other humans’ collective experience in a needless bouts of cock measuring. I fear too much focus on disparities and irrational comparisons has driven a majority of our society to go for the gold and disregard everything til payment is in hand. There is too little focus on the positive powers one has or can grow to have and too much focus on socioeconomic comfort. The positive motions and notions, encouragement and coaching, lessons learned and missions accomplished should be enough to ensure one’s prosperity of mind, body, and spirit.

Much of society in its current iteration, especially that of mass-apathy, does nothing more than produce perpetual ill will. Of course ill will exists to toughen up our armor, to make the sun feel warmer through our ramparts. But one thing I cannot stand for is the elitism in the thought that one person’s produce is better than the others. Better genes. Better GDP. Better accomplishments. Somewhere along the way, in some iteration of mankind past, we forgot what it meant to let the individual grow and express in order to bring back to the community what new fruit of mind could be savored together.

Surrounded by creatives such as yourselves, you’d think I’d be capable of producing something more than a half-baked analysis on the state we’re all in. Everything’s a song lyric or a brush stroke to fuck the pain away. Our generation is a bard that plays a bittersweet self-mutilating, self-glorifying mazurka of identity crisis. Mages of misplaced melancholy and fences of fine fabrications.  The creative repression institutionalized by mass media has definitely numbed me. It’s hard for someone like me to feel motivated to pursue any creative endeavor, much less anything else, when it feels like humans sabotaged the future of humans with the introduction of mine and yours, green and gold.

A disclaimer — feel free to disregard my spin on syntax and semantics. I feel that no one is better than the other, and without the help of others, everyone and thing is but star by-products. I am scatterbrained yet expected to be a hustler by those more established in the system. I am not perfect but I strive to be myself. I’m still learning, but the galaxy knows what is and what is not, and as long as I mean and do well from the core of my being, then I can contribute to the continued renaissance that is mankind’s creative and intellectual endeavors.

Cue solace.

When all is said and done, I try to remember that I am and always have been my own canvas. And ultimately my own renaissance, man.