“you’re so gifted !” someone once told me.
“you’re definitely gifted and destined to do great things.”
for quite some time, i believed this was true: that i was gifted.
and that my life was going to be a wild wild ride on the mountains of creativity…
(blessed be the flames of egomania, burning mankind one bonfire at a time).
a few years back, something hit me :
how can you possibly be so gifted whilst your brain can’t help but screw you so deeply, like every minute, every second, that passes by ?
so gifted that you can only glimpse under the thin veil that is the great magical land of creativity, that you can only get a swift taste ?…
so gifted that you feel like miles (*light years*) apart from all your fellow humans and their patterns of ideas ? alien, awkward…
as awkward in life as Baudelaire’s Albatross ? (damned romantic poets !)
thinking of it, maybe i was just designed to be gifted but only as a f*cking introspective persona.
inside of me, there’s a whole frakkin’ universe, full from top-roof to a hundred ceilings leading to rooms & rooms roaming and bursting with high voltage and neuronal disasters, down to a labyrinth of basements (and finally below it: 13 stairways to my personal hellish caves).
and all this universe is overflowing with exuberant ideas & (maybe genius?) thoughts… some deeply colored, some just plain mono, but all delicately intricated in a precious and evergrowing entanglement of webs of thoughts, clothed by the texture of what poetry is made of : the gold of the ancient alchemists.
meanwhile IRL, i’m crying my heart out, every now and then, being either so belated or so sad, trying to uproot some tiny sketch or erratic rhyme, or even some maniac prose, all out of this mischievous mind, that i was granted to bear and deal with.
the final finding being that, 99% of the time, when this mysterious force called ‘creativity’ overflows outside of me, i’m having a small (ego-tripping) epiphany realizing that i’m just a goddamned imposture, driven by sensations, feelings and even visions that are mostly alien to me.
sure, my inner child (whom i’m so ferociously protecting & nurturing) can lure the adults around me, but not my adult-self : i’m far from gifted.
this flow of messed-up creativity is just a curse (thank you romantic poets !).
after all, it’s just a matter of “matter” :
my brain is hijacking himself in a perpetual movement.
like an ouroboros on an acid test.
and all i can do is watch.
sometimes full of contentment, sometimes in sheer awe or through a kind of hazy fog (depending on my mood swings) what wonders this messy fountain of creativity will spit out of me.
and i nurse myself: don’t worry, all this is only the reflection of a long lost family madness, everything is just fine. go for it, absorb it, & think afterwards when the waves have rolled over the shore.
see, i’m not gifted.
my mind is full of endless spawning legions of thoughts & ideas.
and this ain’t going to end in peace whether i make offerings or not.
and yes : i tried meditation and yoga !
and yes : i can silence all this mess for a while if i really want to.
but do i want to ??
truth be : all i want and can do about it is to smile.
for i am enjoying this wild ride 99% of the time.
i’m not gifted, i’m just playing around with make-believe,
while enjoying the irony and the views,
wondering if all this grey matters turning into cotton-candy actually *is* a present,
or maybe just venom for the soul.
{ “L’art de plaire est l’art de tromper” – Vauvenargues }
Gift / Etymology / Wiktionnary
From Middle English gift (also yift, yeft, ȝift, ȝeft), partly from Old English ġyft, ġieft, ġift (“giving, consideration, dowry, wedding”) and Old Norse gipt (“gift, present, wedding”); both from Proto-Germanic *giftiz (“gift”). Cognate with West Frisian jefte (“gift”), Saterland Frisian Gift (“gift”), German Low German Gift (“poison”), Dutch gift (“gift”) and its doublet gif (“poison”), German Gift (“poison”), Swedish gift (“gift, poison, venom”), Icelandic gift (“gift”).
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