Return to Honesty {read: enter at your own risk}

I was thinking about creativity the other morning and it suddenly struck me that so much of creativity is about honesty. If the artist is not being honest in their art, its impact will be far less and the art is reduced to something more mediocre. Raw honesty is compelling and true. Art should remind the viewer of something familiar, something they might not be able to put their finger on, but they recognize it as something deeply real, or maybe something forgotten or lost in themselves. Art needs to make the viewer think, look deeper, see the world from a different angle or a new lens.

This is the voice in me when I write, too: Keep it honest, Christy. Keep it honest and true........

You can't sugarcoat art or bundle it up so it doesn't hurt when it pricks you. Art is there. It is ours. It reveals our humanity in a million different ways and all art contributes to our story- the one we're trying to weave together, the one about us.

The other day, I wrote a phrase that kind of fell into my mind one evening when I was brushing my teeth

I have confidence in my writing because it never fails to force me up against all my insecurities. If it did anything less, I wouldn't trust it.

I keep coming back to this because I wonder if I actually believe that. I wonder if I actually want to believe that. 

I was walking to class today and thinking about it, and I suddenly realized that I'm not always honest in the way I share my writing. Not here, at least. I pick and choose what I want to publish and, in all honesty, most of what I put up here is the end of the means. It delivers the good stuff in an easy package, but I edit out all of the other writing that leads up to these ideas. The reason I say that this is not honest is because I don't offer the journey. Yes, these are glimpses and snapshots, but not the whole.

I'm challenging myself to a new level of real, here. It might look a little messy and detached sometimes, but I am going to offer more in the little chips and snatches of writing that I would have kept saved in a document on my computer. That's not exactly an apology, either. It is a precursor, and that is exciting even to me, because I have no idea what is coming next.

Enter at your own risk.