What I Want to Do For a Living Will Hurt the Ones I Love

Balancing passion, ability, and tact in my interpersonal relationships

I need to create. I need to write and express just to even begin to make sense of it all. So many highly-charged emotions circle in my head so fast that I can feel them ripping my psyche apart. That’s what bad days are like. When bad days happen, I need to create. Or, if I don’t have the energy to, I need to feel like I can relax because I’ve at least consistently created in the recent past.

After going through a few jobs when I graduated college, I realized it would be difficult to find one that I felt good in mentally. I get so much anxiety about work. A job is something we spend most of our lives doing. Personally, I need to enjoy my work and feel my job is ethical, or I’m deeply miserable. Call it an artist’s temperament, call it being difficult — it’s all the same to me — but it doesn’t make the anxiety any less potent.

Recently, I finally came to terms with the fact that I have to write, and I have to create films in order to feel a sense of purpose. It was a relief to know that I’d truly tried a variety of things, and I still landed on those two creative exercises every time. Whether it’s teaching writing or film studies, or even actively doing them to support myself, I knew at least the ballpark of what I wanted to do that would make the anxiety a little less visceral.

Then a part of me began feeling dread. For some context, my relationship with my family has always been incredibly tumultuous. Many years were filled with hatred, depression, and anxiety. My parents and I have gone through a lot in our relationship. But when a year of not speaking to each other eventually forced us to exercise difficult honesty and endure fierce vulnerability, we were finally able to come out the other side and start the healing process. For real this time.

While I’m endlessly grateful for our unlikely reconciliation, there continues to be a major problem: I can’t just forget about all the years of anger, of fighting, of abuse — it’s fundamental to who I am and to the stories I need to tell, and it always will be.

Expressing myself involves being critical of the people closest to me

When I create work that actually means something to me, it’s almost impossible to leave out harsh truths about my family. I want to explain how it felt to feel threatened by my own parent, or how it felt to believe my sibling didn’t even love me. I want to be in solidarity with all the other humans who were, at one point, children in my same position. Doing that without specifically discussing my family at length is hard, if not impossible.

It’s also hard because our relationship, after therapy, is in a much better place right now. We’ve buried most of the poison together. I don’t want to dig it back up because I’m finally at peace with them. I don’t need any more heart-to-hearts about how they hurt me. I’m willing to — and I have — forgiven them. But as a creator and storyteller, it leaves me in an awkward position. A part of creating, especially when publishing or putting something online, is public by nature.

All creators have come to terms with this truth: Someone will know the people you’re talking about. Perhaps, even the people themselves will find the work you’ve maybe been trying to hide. Then they’ll know the eloquent, brutal truth of who they were and are to you. Then they’ll want to talk to you about it. Even if they don’t — if you’re anything like me — you’ll feel guilty. You’ll feel so guilty that you’ve made someone else feel bad, even when they spent a lot of your life making you feel that way.

When you have a success in your life, say as a writer if you get published somewhere prestigious or your film plays at Cannes, you’ll want to share it with the people you love. You’ll want to discuss your work with them. But it’ll be hard to discuss an opinion piece or a film without opening up an enormous conversation about what the piece or film means to you, and why you even choose to create it in the first place.

What’s it all worth?

These scenarios can make you question whether creating meaningful content is even worth it at all. It feels too complicated, and you have too much anxiety and guilt to make others feel bad. Using the lives of those around you is, unfortunately, often a requirement of telling meaningful stories. All of this can induce a massive headache and make you feel like maybe, you should just stop creating and choose to do something less emotionally loaded.

But you won’t. And you shouldn’t.

In the end, we all create. All of us have different things to say through our creations, and some of us have and need to say more than others. You cannot push away stories and voices that feel true to you, because they will always be there, kneeling in the corner of every room you stand in, waiting for you to acknowledge them. Writing and creating can make you feel fickle, because although your unique opinion is always worth expressing and being heard, we all still have to navigate the same world where every single person has their own truth. We all have a human right to tell our truth.

And sometimes, we will hurt people. We will hurt the people who are the closest to us. That’s a risk that, if you’re a particular kind of artist, you have to take. I don’t view it as optional. Though the fear of causing disruption in the now healthy relationship between me and my parents has kept me from telling stories about them in the past, it won’t anymore.

I won’t stop telling my story, and I shouldn’t.