old diary entries
on 'success'
28/12/22
even if all I’ve already done are the only things I ever achieve, who is anyone else to devalue that because it stopped? To tell me it didn’t matter because I didn’t ‘succeed’? We are hurtling towards our own annihilation as a species with global warming and late stage capitalism. In this system, nobody truly succeeds. There is no amount of wealth or ‘success’ that can save any individual from our collective fate.
I have a friend who wrote a viral poem at 18. It changed my life.
She has become a lifelong friend. Every time she has written anything lately, she sighs softly and says,
“I don’t feel like I have anything to say anymore”.
I don’t find this sad, because I know writing will return to her again if she ever needs it. And maybe…just maybe…that one poem was enough. She’s learned two new languages, travelled and permanently moved to another country. Maybe she moved onto other adventures.
It’s the fallacy of infinite growth, isn’t it? These strange metrics that we all try to abide by, the very suffocating blanket for art itself. What does winning the popularity game do to art? People burn out, get used and abused by the system and then suffer. Deified to then get pulled from these celebrity podiums, stalked and vilified.
Is that truly ‘success’?
And can our art not experience winters?
Kathryn Joseph worked in bars for years because she felt undeserving of doing music, then lost her baby, and told herself, “if this baby doesn’t live, I’m doing music”, and so she did, and I saw her show. She was 49. What a fruitful, beautiful gift to emerge mid-40s. Would that same gift have emerged in her twenties? I’m not so sure.
Self Esteem is a few years older than me, piercing through the glass ceiling with a laser focussed needle of honesty, her wealth of experience creating something resonant with women in a way early twenty year olds haven’t experienced, yet.
The art we most need holds experience. The art we most need takes time.
Heir Of The Cursed created one song that hit me harder than any other song ever will. Then, she died. Her work never reached a huge audience. Does that make her song any less ‘successful’? A live recording forever on the internet that moved me to tears - what’s the ‘metrics’ of that? Is something I hold so dear to my heart a ‘failure’ because it didn’t reach the entire world?
How many times did we fall down as kids riding bikes? How many years did it take to learn guitar? Does it matter if no one ever hears you play it? Think of Molly Drake, Nick Drake’s mother, who inspired his songwriting. Were her songs not successes because she kept them to herself?
Art isn’t objective or quantifiable. The things that move us matter irregardless of monetary value. We can’t measure art on capitalist metrics.
