does magic die?

I guess it's unfortunate that I feel the need to write a really good thing. Poem, article, story, song. If it's going to be done, it has to be done right, and it has to be completely invincible in the face of the criticism it may receive once it leaves my notebook. It must be my passion perfected.

I talked with a friend recently about the problems that accompany turning a passion into a career, one of them being that the passion starts to become more work than joy. The focus suddenly becomes the money and whether people are happy with your service or not. And then that meshes into whether you're happy with your product - even though it doesn't matter. At least, it shouldn't. It didn't matter in the beginning: it wasn't about the product then. It was purely about how you felt while you created it. The life that you got from it. And now that thing is your life, but not in the way you'd imagined it would be. What do you do when the task kills the joy part of your lifeblood?

This hit me. During that conversation, I made a promise to myself that I would never let the task become the only reason for creating. I would never let the urgency to release a product dampen the effect that my product has on me. 

And yet I fear I already am.

Halfway through my eighteenth year - having never held a job of greater importance than that of a salon receptionist (not to lessen the importance of salon receptionists). Haven't even had the chance to explore a career in journalism - barely begun the work to earn the degree to do so. And already I'm worried that my incessant need to write something right is taking over my desire to write something real. "Real" and "right" are very much different. Real holds honesty, right holds truth. And those aren't necessarily the same things, either. If you're truthful, you're saying things that people subconsciously already know to exist. It's either common knowledge or just a given, or its meant to be shocking or come as a surprise in order to increase readership. If you're being honest, you are speaking from a place deep within you, where none besides yourself would venture without your having created a vessel for it to be released in the first place - and this may be met with some criticism, because people's hearts don't always match up. What you hold to be true - your own honesty - may not be someone else's truth. And yet it would be wrong of them to tell you that your honesty is wrong, because only you know the true "correctness" of your heart.

I don't need people to agree with my heart. But I do need to hold myself to the standard of heart-sharing, heart-telling, and heart-showing. Personal truths are not false truths, as long as you don't try to promote them as only truths.

My magic isn't dead, because my heart is still alive. I just have to keep reminding myself to listen to what it has to say and write that. And then my writing will never become a task done purely for others' consumption. Because reporting on what your heart has to say is never a dull task.