almost honest

the limits of creative expression

After gaining notoriety from a juvenile and raw mixtape, Earl Sweatshirt was sent to boarding school in Samoa for a few years. By 2013, his friends, like Tyler, the Creator, had painted it as a legendary exile. When he finally released his debut album Doris, I was a sixteen-year-old deeply entrenched in the lore of it all, and I was deeply excited to hear what the now nineteen-year-old Earl had to offer. The album was perfect to me: incredible beat selection complementing his monotonous vocals, literary references woven into complex inner rhymes. Its subject matter was heavy at times — digging into difficulties with fame, struggling to be vulnerable about his estranged father, general alienation from his peers growing up. For a lonely and nerdy teen like myself, there was nothing better. I listened to the album constantly, grew familiar with the rhyme schemes, and even wrote an essay for English class about the lead single’s allusions to Edgar Allan Poe.

Despite all of the impressive and literary things that Earl did on this album, the part that stuck with me then, and still bounces around in my head at times, came from an interlude at the beginning of “Burgundy.” Earl imitates a hater making fun of him for his struggles with depression, saying, “Nobody care about how you feel, we want raps,” before the beat drops. It’s a simple statement of the nature of society: often, a man is only as good as his output, and one’s feelings are a detriment to that output. But the song that follows the interlude is an expression of his feelings — he is giving the people what they want, while still being able to represent the feelings that apparently no one cares about.

I don’t know if I was conscious of how much I internalized these thoughts over the last few years. Earl served as a template for how raw emotion could be transformed into craft — I let my writing veer more and more into my feelings, but only if I could figure out a way to represent them in a way that felt interesting enough to be more than just venting. It wasn’t enough to just describe the feelings I had, complain about whatever was going poorly or going well. No, an existential crisis was deemed shareable once it was wrapped in a film analysis, feelings of loss were good enough to share once turned into a prose poem. This was self-expression, but not in a pure and authentic way. The feelings are transformed into objects and ideas, cut up and seasoned with flourish and literary techniques to try and make them seem more or less meaningful.

Even as I watch my audience slowly grow over time, I half-jokingly tell my friends that I could never blow up for my writing because no one wants to read about how a man feels. There’s no market for it, I say, half-hoping that someone will correct me. But no one disagrees.

People don’t really care how a man feels, but my friends and family care how I feel. People won’t necessarily care about my actual feelings, but they can see value in the way I conjure them into something else with a beautiful set of words, alchemizing emotion into something delectable and digestible. Feeling pride for an accomplishment must be turned into a story of change and growth, a negative thought spiral should be tinged with flowery language and end on a hopeful note.

This works for me most of the time. These feelings used to overwhelm me and make it difficult for me to function. I would find myself paralyzed by anxiety, wondering if life was just made to be coped with rather than to be experienced. Now I can make something out of these feelings. I turn them into essays that let me make new friends and stay connected to those who care about me. I’ve gotten good at this form of vulnerability, one where intellectualizing feelings and craft can dull the sharpness of emotion. But it doesn’t make the emotions disappear. It doesn’t mean that I process them. Even with their dull blades, they have their ways of leaving their impact. Writing serves as my main coping mechanism, but in the face of an upheaval as big as my move to New York, this system began to show its cracks.

Over the last few weeks, months, I felt overwhelmed at all times. I was wrought with anxiety and confusion, unable to grapple with the grief of losing everything I loved about San Francisco, frozen by the enormity of the task in front of me to figure out the logistics of moving across the country. In this state, I wasn’t a very good friend or family member — the only things I felt equipped to do were to work out really hard and try to deliver at work, hoping that I would be able to figure something about when it came to everything else in my life.

Through all of this, I hardly ever considered asking other people for help or doing more than mentioning that I was stressed by jokingly calling myself a crazy person with how frazzled I felt. Instead, I did something that I rarely do — I binged a TV show. In between and during my various logistical tasks and packing, I watched episodes of the show Shrinking, following a therapist dealing with the death of his wife through connection with his friends, family, and neighbors. Even though it was humorous, it was also deeply moving in its depiction of grief and of the messiness of human connections, with each character forced to grow in their relationships to each other.

While I couldn’t find any way to be vulnerable about my struggles, I could weep at the moving moments of this show and find a release from my emotions. I witnessed characters on the show able to be vulnerable in ways that I could never imagine myself being and felt the emotions like they were mine. This felt like a solution, like I had made progress in feeling my feelings, being a well-adjusted person.

Is this what art has become to me? The man, unable to normally connect to his own feelings, so divorced from his body, can only cry when he watches a TV show or a movie or looks at a painting, can only express himself when he sublimates his feelings into writing. Perhaps this is a release, but it’s not enough; it’s not real vulnerability.

This became painfully clear as I prepared to leave San Francisco. When I said goodbye to my friends, I found it difficult to admit how much I would miss them, or to tell them that I loved them. Maybe it was because I had drifted away from them, or maybe it was that I had held them at arm’s length for a while, afraid that growing closer to them would make them leave like so many of my lost friendships over the years. It seems silly, but the heart is illogical and fearful. I spent many years feeling distant enough from everyone that any level of closeness could feel like the first spring day after an endless winter. When blessed with simply knowing all of the incredible people I’ve had the opportunity to meet, it feels like greed to ask for anything more, even if it’s to ask them to receive my love.

Now, in New York, I sit over two thousand miles from those I was closest with. I don’t know when I will see any of them again, if I will see any of them again. Here, I have a clean slate — only loose relationships with people I once knew. Here, I have a chance to acknowledge my mistakes and try to learn how to find the vulnerability I’ve been avoiding in writing and in art. Here, I can work to grow until I’m able to be expressive beyond my words, be open, be ready for any opportunity to truly show how I feel to those most important to me, and to trust that they’ll do the same if that opportunity should ever arise. There’s a long road ahead of me here, but there’s a clear path forward.

Earl was on a track last year, looking happier and healthier than he had for a while. He said many things in a single verse, as he always does, but another simple line stood out: “I'm not okay, but I'm gon' be alright.” After all this time, he’s still the template.

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💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - EUSEXUA by FKA Twigs - she’s always so good

• POEM - “How to Live” by Todd Dillard - Depravity begins with thinking of love / as a radical act.