A Strongly Worded Letter

"As a writer, you ask yourself to dream while awake," -Aimee Bender

Dear parents who tell us our dreams are worthless,

Dear people who tell us writers that we need to get a 'real job',

Dear society who brushes the stage aspirations of others to the side,

Dear the hard-assed old lady teachers who crumple up kids papers when they're doodling in class,

Dear STEM-lovers who disregard our passions as worthless, frivolous, or trivial,

I would like to inform you of something.

**

Society sees the arts as worthless, something for mere entertainment. It's the social workers, the doctors, lawyers, who do more good for society, right?

Wrong.

But I know what you really want.  You want to cram our colorful, imaginative, beautiful minds into a cardboard box.  You want us to be cookie-cutter members of society.

But again, I'm here to tell you that we just can't.  As creatives, we were meant to bend the rules, to push the envelope, to think like there was no box to begin with. The colloquial box you try to fit us in and understand us doesn't exist.

You dislike us, you disregard us, you laugh at us, you refuse to understand us, for the mere reason because you are afraid of us. Because creativity changes things.  And you don't like change.

Nobody remembers the unknown citizen. In history, we remember the leaders, the innovators, the extraordinary ones, the people who went their own way and did something for themselves. Creativity is invaluable, and you will not staunch it in us.

So, fellow artists of all shapes, and sizes, never let society bog down your dreams of extraordinary proportions. Never let their toxic words stick with you. Because if you let their words dig their thorns into your rainbow veins, you'll regret it, and soon, you too will become the unknown citizen, which is a fate more dire than failure.

*****

Well, I haven't ranted in a while, so I thought I might.

Enjoy fellow artists!

~The WordShaker