When Were You a Poet?

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I have known a lot of people, male and female, who wrote poetry when they were young. It was a rite of passage into and out of adolescence.  Many did the same thing with journaling, diary entries, drawing and art making in general. And it was almost always about two things.  The creative urge to write and visualize at that age was about expressing feelings, emoting and self-discovery.  But as time passed many figured things out, the angst lessened and the need to express in that way diminished.

Or at least they thought it did. But the truth is many stopped creating and regretted it. It may have taken a while but at some point they realized they had let something important go. It may have been they needed to rediscover themselves and they once again felt the urge to express that.  But they could also have matured and realized creative endeavors aren’t just about letting the world know how you feel. Sometimes it’s a way to understand how the rest of the world feels. Sometimes it’s a way to make sense of a world by returning to something fundamental in themselves.

If you are twenty, I encourage you to keep writing, keep creating.  This will require you grow beyond your own expression of self and start using your creative force to imagine and understand other worlds.  If you are 40 and stopped your creativity years ago, I encourage you to start that stagnant engine again. It might require some hard work, but it will be worth it.


Drawing and commentary © 2017 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com

“To be a poet at age twenty is to be twenty. To be a poet at age forty is to be a poet.” – Eugene Delacroix


Artists Who Seek Perfection In Everything Are Those Who Can’t Attain It In Anything

“Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who can’t attain it in anything.” – Eugene Delacroix

So, it’s another dichotomy. Seeking perfection all the time assures you that you won’t find it. So if you truly are a thinking perfectionist your strategy would have to be to not seek it all the time, but be aware of it when it happens.

I have found perfectionism in young people has to do with perceived external rules and pressures while that same phenom in older people has an internal rule or standard that guides them. While I think their is some sort of progress there, I also think that either way, the perfectionist is so constantly living with disappointment and frustration that no moment of perfection would be able to compensate anyway.

Drawing © 2022 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com