The plight of the “undeserving.”

Whoever they are.

Dark Rider | Unsplash

One of my favorite writers on Medium is Dominique Matti. Everything about her writing deserves everything about every kind of admiration I know of. Her soul and her grace and her abandon deserve every piece of attention she gets, and if I had the resources, I would make sure that she had the kind of worldly reward that a writer of her caliber ought to get for writing how she writes.

She traces lines made of soul and lets us see them. That’s enough to admire her, and it also ought to be enough reason to support her. But it so happens that because of her willingness to be honest, it looks as if the realities of her life invite the kind of sympathy that also invites, in me at least, an impulse to recognize that a “deserving person” is deserving for more reasons than just because of talent.

I don’t mean this to sound indelicate, but I risk its indelicacy by even bringing it up. So let me be clear that what I am about to say comes from a place of care, I hope. I respect the living hell out of Dominique Matti. Because of the above mentioned grace and some kind of strength that makes me feel like it’s a good thing she’s living her life and I’m not, because I would not be able to handle it the way that she seems to be handling it, and I am so proud of her — insofar as practical strangers can be proud of one another.

Because what it is, see, is that as far as I can tell, Dominique Matti lives a hard life. Not impossible, but hard. And it’s the kind of life that tugs at the heartstrings enough to make me feel like supporting her because of the hardness of her life. Not only is she a deserving talent, but she’s a deserving person. She deserves the support of a community — support here meaning money — because of the circumstances of her life, as much as because she’s a gem of a talent and it would be a damned shame if she lost hope and stopped writing.

It’s easy to lose hope as an artist of any kind. It’s easy to let the world break us. And if we’re broken, it’s awfully hard to see the point in keeping up the grind. Without hope of some kind, the work part of creative work just feels like that: sticking your head in a meat grinder for a little while every day. What’s the good of torturing myself every day without the support of some community or other? All art is pain, and pain is only cathartic if we can assure ourselves that it means something.

Which is a difficult thought to think for artists who don’t need to decide between paying the electric bill and the food bill. I don’t know if Dominique is in that kind of place now, but I think she has been before. I pray that she’s not there right now.

A lot of writers have this happening to them right now. The whole starving artist image? That’s a real image. Find them. Feed them. This is not a joke.

And, because I only ever think about myself, I have to ask myself: where the hell do I get off proposing to ask a community to support my writing when being paid for my writing right now does not mean the difference between eating or electricity this month? I am a creative person and all I want to do with my life is write stories. My only good days these days — or my best days — are the days when I get to spend the whole day writing, editing, and reading, with occasional interruptions for returning emails and refilling my tea. That’s all I want to do.

But I don’t deserve it. That’s the thought I keep telling myself — or that I keep fighting with. I am a selfish, useless, unfeeling elitist to think that I have the right to only half way pay attention at a day job that keeps me in an okay apartment with okay food, month in and month out. I can’t afford a new car, but I don’t have to choose which bills to pay. A lot of people would say I have it pretty good.

A part of me tells me every day that I’m being ungrateful to have any pretense toward calling myself a writer who deserves anyone’s attention. Not while there are writers at risk of starvation, who won’t be able to make rent this month if they don’t get enough support for their writing. Where do I get off trying to ask for attention when other writers truly deserve support? All I can do is, what? Complete a sentence or two? How is that a skill worth a few ducats?

I don’t have a good conclusion to that thought. What can I say about it? That if I don’t write I do starve, because I starve my soul? Yeah — that is true for me. But how does that compare? I don’t know if it does. And I don’t know if it does because I don’t know if it does. I can’t even speak to it. I’ve never had that alternative to face. Do I let my soul starve or my body starve? That’s not a choice I’ve ever had to make. I’ve never experienced affluence, but I’ve never experienced hunger either. I don’t know what hardship means. Unless a lot changes in a hurry, I never will either, unless I make it hard for myself, you know? I could quit my job and become a writer full time and induce desperation into my life. I could do that. But that sounds like it would be fake and hardly good anyway, so I never will.

Which leaves me…nowhere easy to justify.

I don’t know. It’s hard, because it seems like a lot of legitimacy in art arises from hardships endured by the artist.

I wonder about that. I expect a lot of writers do.

I love reading Dominique Matti’s writing, and I encountered it a long time before I noticed she’d written anything about the “hardship” of her life — hardship in quotations there, because it certainly looks hard to me, but I don’t know if she would call it that. Even before I knew about whatever “hardship” she might have in her life, I wanted to assassinate her, because I saw her as competition. She wrote so elegantly and so fiercely that I figured the only way I could compete with her would be to eliminate her from the competition entirely.

Which is why, above, I expressed my opinion about her deserving nature, based on merit, independently of what you might call her needs-based deserving nature.

I feel like, maybe, that’s how it should work, maybe.

Because, maybe, she’s more deserving than I am. She probably is, for a lot of reasons. A lot of writers probably are.

At the same time, I feel like maybe I should somehow disentangle myself from the loop that comes from telling myself that more hardship equates to more legitimacy.

I have spent most of my life now devoting myself to writing. That, also, ought to mean something, shouldn’t it? Not my call. Just a question for the void.

Maybe the problem is in thinking about the word “deserving.” How could I strive to be “deserving” at all? Isn’t that a decision for other people to make about me? Just as it’s a decision for me to make about Dominique Matti, whose talent, I think, deserves all the admiration I can muster?

Anyway.

The moral of the story is, find an artist who deserves your appreciation, and appreciate them.

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Oliver “Shiny” Blakemore

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The best part of being a mime is never having to say I’m sorry.

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