Lesson #1-The Curse

3:46 am. Against my body's better judgment, my mind begins to bang awake like an untethered shutter in a windstorm. A stream of images coalesce in my brain and begin to dance and shuffle in a gray light. These are images I have seen before and yet they are coming to me in a different form this time, they have altered themselves for my entertainment, and confusion. New characters, scenes, and story ideas advance with heavy footsteps tamping down new soil, yet I am strangely in control. I shift and play with them, taking them down different paths just to see where they will go. A part of my brain pleads to go back to sleep, asking with arms raised to do this later, but it is too late I am gone, out to lunch, playing in my sandbox. These images are part of a creative idea that I have been working on for nearly six months and they have once again come out of nowhere to play, shouting like a neglected child, "Look at me, LOOK AT ME!". And yet this is only the one tentacle of "the curse", the one that only tickles the inside of your skull, the other seven wrap themselves hard around my head and squeeze, demanding that I obey.

You have to create, you have no choice.

This is my curse. I am a creative person and I have this curse, this "have to" in supermarket parking lot spades. I am never in total control of my life and what happened this morning is a daily occurrence. I have no control over when it happens or how hard it will hit me, it just starts and I am committed to its irresistible display. I do not know if I always had "the curse" or whether it developed over time, I just don't remember and it reminds me not to worry about it, unimportant now. All I know is that it has both ruined and saved my life and without it I would be human dust.

The curse of art has brought me the greatest joy and the deepest heartache. It has granted me vision, passion, and the ability to see madness without going mad. I am now a mirror, an oracle, a guide, an entertainer and a prophet all because of the simple curse of creativity. This curse is the most important ingredient in me becoming both an animator and artist and surely fuels my faucet dripping drive to continue day by day, hour by hour.

Lesson #1 Get CURSED!