When Will We Realise That Our Work Is Sacred Too?
You should worship what you create.
A few days ago, I found a notebook with an exceptionally filthy blue cover. It belongs to a little girl obsessed with becoming the next J.K. Rowling, or attending Hogwarts if she were a witch, whichever is easier.
The book is filled with pages after pages of hundred-word descriptions of a certain grey-haired Persian cat, Elsa from Frozen, Harry Potter, dreams about becoming a scientist, and accounts from her daily life. On the first page of the notebook, in lopsided handwriting, are the words “Property of Sarah Bisht, the smartest witch and troublemaker of Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft. Dare to open this book, and you will be Imperiused’.
I started writing at the age of seven or eight. I used to create these small, 100-word essays about things I like, people around me, my Elsa doll (the most important thing in my life at that time), and my future. They were modest little concoctions, filled to the brim with adjectives I found in books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Harry Potter, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and Tuck Everlasting. They were nothing special- just the thoughts of a seven-year-old, complete with the rambling sentences, zero connection between the paragraphs, and the writing in a topsy-turvy state.
I wasn’t one of those kids you hear about in the news- the ones who are seven but write better than Dickens, Tolstoy and Shakespeare combined. In fact, I was painfully average. Sure, I was able to form moderately superior sentences than the average kid in my class, but that was just because I was a few reading levels above most kids my age, having started a few years earlier. But I was still a kid, and I did what most kids do: shamelessly copy Roald Dahl’s work, change it to suit my purpose, and pass it off as my own. Maybe not in that order, but you get the idea. Although, you can’t judge me; I was only seven. That’s what seven-year-olds do; emulate the ones they most admire, and my seven-year-old self was quite thrilled with words like “swashboggling” and “fizzwiggler.” So she went, she copied, she pasted.
I grew up. I am fourteen years old now. These days, I do not go about stealing the works of great writers, but I still take a leaf out of their books. But when you try to echo the painstaking simplicity of Orwell, the neo-classicism of Austen, and the realism of Dostoevsky, you somewhat lose yourself in the process. You forget who you are. In order to please everyone, you don’t write what you want to. You try to write like they wrote, because the painful truth is that humans are still worshipping the masters that came before them, and they still consider on-going work or inventions to have no real value.
But the worst thing, I would even say one of the most dangerous things that humans do, is to consider their own work to be insignificant, not valuable enough to be regarded as anything other than just another brick in the wall.
Humans have this strange quality of labeling their own work as “mediocre” or “average”. While we put numerous different people on the pedestal, we never tell ourselves that our work matters, and that it impacts the world in a big way. If the people of history whom we read about today had said, “Gee, my work is painfully average, and it will never stand the tests of time,” would we be reading about them today? No, we wouldn’t, because they wouldn’t have shipped their work after saying that. When one doesn’t consider one’s work sacred, why would one try to give one’s all to do it? Once the thought that my work doesn’t matter crosses our minds, we stop working towards anything big. We start lifting off other people’s work, because that’s the easiest thing to do, and it doesn’t require us to slog away at something that we don’t consider important ourselves, let alone others. That is when we truly become average.
Ayn Rand said, “Why does it become scared for the mere fact of not being your own?” We live our lives feeling that what we do is not good enough, that we must copy the ones who came before us for people to take us seriously. But if the people who came before us, the famous ones, had copied the ones before them, and those ones had copied the celebrated ones of their time, would the world have evolved? Would humans have created something wholly new? In the whole idea of “good artists copy, great artists steal,” we forget the most important thing- a human being’s capacity to think and create something unique. The thing we all have, sitting there, waiting for us to use it. Every step of our lives, we ask ourselves “What would this famous person do?” Instead, we should be asking, “What would I do?
You should take inspiration from others. It is completely alright, good even. But you shouldn’t duplicate what others do.
That will make you an aper.
And no one wants to be an aper.
Be who you are, even if who you are is someone not as good as who you aspire to be (at the time).
It may seem at that time that you won’t achieve anything, but if you keep on trying your hand at it, one day, you will be better than whatever level you dared to reach.
Love what you create. Then only will you create something the world won’t dare to forget.
