The Initiation of an Artist

The paradox of being a newbie artist has been keeping me up at night lately. On one hand, it feels like I’m being thrashed, tossed in a chaotic sea with no time to get my bearings. I see the shoreline, the vision. I know which way to go. Yet every time I feel like I hit a clean stroke and get some momentum, another colossal wave of inquiry, discovery, critique, and comparison pushes me back out. I consider myself a decent-enough swimmer, good enough to not die at least, but damn if it isn’t exhausting.

On the other hand, the role of The Beginner feels like a cloak of regality has been placed upon my shoulders, like the writing gods have watched me with careful eyes and finally decided, “Yes, she’s ready.” I buzz with excitement at the opportunity to finally express myself, to throw the cover off the creative who’s been lying dormant within me all this time. For the longest, this dormancy felt like a prison sentence, like I was bound to live with a brain stuffed to the brim with insecurities, questions, longings, complaints—without the vocabulary to express it all. I attributed this mentally busy avoidance to being ruled by a Mercury sitting lazily in my Taurus ninth house, pondering endlessly about far-reaching, identity-shaping topics yet doing nothing with them. I’d sit down with my pen and paper and get to writing about a thought or a question. I’d word-vomit my feelings onto the page, then lose my train of thought and move on to something else, something a little less challenging, a little less confronting, like watching dumb TikToks about who should pay on a first date. Our moms were right; it really is those phones.

I’ve always had something to say, but it seemed like I couldn’t get out of my own way long enough to help it materialize into something real, something good. I’d just dump on the page long enough to make that particular point stop humming in the background of my mind. But these thoughts weren’t just thoughts. They were blips of information transported to me from the Universe to make manifest in the physical. I had been trusted with divine information yet deduced it to frivolous babble that I needed to get rid of right away so I can focus on more “important” things, like making money and figuring out if I even liked my boyfriend.

When I finally figured out the point of all of this (a story I will likely share some other time), my mind was blown. I had figured out “the secret.” My writing wasn’t about coming up with a combination of words that sounded good and made semi-decent sense (though that certainly helps); it was a divine tool of self-discovery, a way for me to get to know myself deeply and flesh out the thoughts and emotions that always seemed to resurface at the most inopportune times, like in class, at work, or in bed at 3 a.m. It wasn’t enough for me to do the talk therapy thing of “naming the problem” and “being self-aware.” I had to look at all sides of it, hold it upside down, rip it to shreds, and put it back together again. I had to roll my sleeves up and get dirty. And I had to be okay with what I produced being absolute dog shit. Like, most of the time. Which is painful as hell for a Virgo rising, but that’s really the point of all this, isn’t it? To trial and error your way toward something that feels right, that feels like an accurate representation of who you are in this moment.

Writing to me used to be just a hobby, a way for me to make sense of the incessant noise that bounced between my ears. I didn’t think of myself as a “writer,” certainly not an “artist,” so I never took the time to perfect the craft. I guess on some level I didn’t feel I was worthy to. But that’s the funny thing about callings, purpose, destiny, whatever you want to name it. It doesn’t really need your stamp of approval. The Universe doesn’t really give a shit if you co-sign its next move. All of a sudden, you’re just doing a new thing. Reading, writing, thinking about things you’d never considered. At least that’s how it felt for me. Similar to how I became an editor.

When adults would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d always say something like “a doctor” or “a nurse.” I was fascinated by the human body—I still am—and I thought applying Band-Aids and looking at cool scars would be all that was expected of me. But as I got older and saw the truth behind the profession—thanks Dr. G and Grey’s Anatomy—I quickly realized that my acute Taurean senses would not be pleased with the sights, smells, and sounds of a real ER. All this to say, little Lyric didn’t think too deeply about a career. Why would she?

So yeah, it was a shock to the system when I clumsily stumbled into an editing career during my senior year in college. To an eyes-wide-shut, pseudo-academic such as myself, it was news to me that I had been carving the perfect path toward a career in books practically my entire life.

At age seven, while shopping for winter coats with my mom at Burlington Coat Factory, I dug through a clearance bin and found a bright-blue, lock-and-key journal with an image of a Lisa Frank-esque dolphin plastered on the front. I don’t remember if I pitched a fit and begged my mom to get it (which I was prone to do from time to time), or if this was one of the times she was in a generous mood, no whining required. I imagine she would have been happy to buy me a journal instead of yet another stuffed animal. Regardless, the journal was secured, and I flipped through the blank pages the entire ride home, itching to get back to my sparkly gel pens so I could do some damage. And judging by the shape of that poor journal today, plenty of damage was done. Through the horrid seven-year-old handwriting and my angsty, perpetually embarrassed pre-teen scribbles, I can barely make out my first entry dated April 10, 2003: “Dear Diary, Today was great tomorrow is going to be better because we’re going to have a substitute teacher tomorrow.” Riveting stuff, I know!

And thus began my writing practice, moving steadily from Leapfrog Learning Pad lessons to Type2Learn to vignettes about my friends, fantasies about another life where I had siblings and wasn’t always the only Black girl in my class, to SpongeBob and anime fanfics I confidently posted online. Little did I know all of this would contribute to my career in publishing just fifteen years later and a full-on writing lifestyle at the gorgeous age of twenty-nine.

So here goes. Perhaps I’ll get this right and produce something I can be proud of. Or perhaps the compulsion to write will just follow me to the bitter end, even if all I put on the page is nonsensical trash. There’s only one way to find out.