Steph Bruzon

*creative liberation, creative blocks, thoughts of failure, the meaning of success, ,uncertainty, fate, a change of plans.

Art has followed me for as long as I can remember. It is the lover that comes in though my window at midnight. It is the baby that whines all night in the crib until I put it in my arms and sing it to sleep. I can’t choose something else, even if I wanted to. That’s the thing: art is like a seed inside each of us. Within most, that seed lays dormant and sprouts every once in a while when asked. Within artists, that seed rages, unasked, untamed.

As a little girl, It first manifested as a love of reading and writing. I learned English my first year of grade school, and I quickly became the best reader in the class. Nothing excited me more than walking around the library in my school. Nothing inspired me more than those three books I could check out every visit.

Come middle school, It rushed right out of me and grew into journal entries and monologues and scenes. Those were the worst years of my life so far, and my love of art got me through it. As a young artist, you constantly feel like you’re born wrong. It’s like everyone around you has substance inside of them whereas you only have a void. Art fills that void, but you haven’t learned that yet, so you just feel aimless. You try to pretend other things interest you, too, so you can fit in with everyone else. You pretend and pretend and pretend until you can’t anymore.

My whole life I had gone to “normal” schools. Come high school, I decided to go to an art school. I spent four years surrounded by the most creative minds around and made films, started a poetry club (one of the most rewarding projects of my life), wrote and directed my own theatre show, and got to constantly nurture that seed. I no longer felt the void as much because it was filled with love, with creativity.

Then, I graduated high school in true oldest-child-in-need-of-validation fashion: with an IB diploma and a strong GPA. I was headed to SCAD in Savannah, Georgia. I was leaving my home state, finally. While my dad drove, I sat in the backseat with my acoustic guitar uncomfortably jammed in between my sister and I.

But I didn’t know if I would be staying in Georgia. I didn’t know if I could afford SCAD. My parents couldn’t make me any promises as far as funding went. I was going to study performing arts; what if I started a career based in uncertainty with tons of debt?

So, I met with the financial aid office and decided to put a wait on my decision (extend my application through the fall term to the winter term). But I’m not sure it’s worth the debt to put myself through the educational system again.

I felt immense shame coming back home though. As an artist, a fear of failure constantly lingers over your mind. You’re told that your path is unstable, among other things. We grow up feeling alienated. We finally find the thing that makes us feel like our authentic selves. And then we make other plans for it because others tells us that it’s not practical.

We make plans for ourselves. We set standards and tell ourselves that we’ll get somewhere if we just get in line. We try to make sense of the gift, but the best part of the gift is that it makes no sense. Originally, I didn’t want to go to college, but I made myself pick a pretty plan that would make my life as a young artist into something digestible.

But the truth is that life is not going to be simple. Life as an artist especially won’t be simple. It’ll take the kind of self-evaluation that most people can’t even imagine undertaking. It’ll take guts and an abundance of patience and love for the craft. I’m not going to wake up with everything I want–and why would I want that anyway? I love the process, the in-between: staying up all night because my soul has things to say, creating poem after poem, song after song, film after film, and never expecting anything out of it because expecting is not the point.

And this strange and often frustrating in-between is often where the true living happens to us. And the art follows the living and vice versa.

People will tell you that you have to make it big to be a big deal. Nothing about that statement is true.

Who I am, who we are, despite what society tells us, is a big fucking deal.

And I might still go to school eventually. I still want to make my Cuban family proud with the diploma that they could never get for themselves.

But I’m not going to be a doctor. I won’t sit at a desk all day. The seed won’t let me. It rages, still.

And I’m not going to do anything just to check some boxes, especially when they’re not even my own boxes to begin with.

This is life as a young artist. You break more than your peers do. You have to come to terms with the fact that your path is vastly different than the path of those around you (and this is true for everyone, not just artists). But especially for us, things will be up in the air all of the time.

Remember: others can’t see the seed unless you show it to them. When you’re still young and exploring, it’s all about trusting yourself enough to commit to it and watch it grow. In the end, we have no choice but to let the art keep speaking lest we wish to deprive ourselves of one of the most beautiful things in this life (how lucky are we to be the called ones?)

Earlier this year, I had the kind of intense mental breakdown I used to have in middle school almost daily. It hadn’t happened in a while, not to that degree. I had to seek medical help for myself. After I was feeling better, I got calls from my family members every day.

On one of those phone calls, a family member told me that I should “maybe take a break from the art thing.” They had good intentions, but my face heated up fast. They figured the art was somehow the root of all my distress. They couldn’t see how art had saved me. They even referenced famous artists and their tragic lives and deaths as reasons why I should stop.

“People who make art go crazy,” they said.

“If I stop making art, I’ll die,” I responded and hung up the phone.

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