Dear starving artists,
One of us has to live. I volunteer.
Not out of selfishness, mind you. Not because I don’t believe in the struggle or the romance of unpaid brilliance. Not because I don’t admire your dedication, your refusal to surrender to the bland practicalities of rent and groceries and, you know, not dying. But because I have seen what happens to those who stay in the fire too long.
And it is not beautiful.
I know, I know. Art is pain, pain is fuel, and fuel keeps the starving artist burning. But that fire? It does not warm. It does not nourish. It does not even illuminate—not in the way you hope. It just… consumes.
I used to believe, like you, that suffering was the price of admission. That the best works—the ones that cracked open the world, that made people feel something—were etched in exhaustion and carved out of nights spent bargaining with the void. I believed that inspiration had to be earned, that if you weren’t hurting, you weren’t trying hard enough.
But here’s the truth they don’t put on the MFA syllabus: The world does not need another artist who dies for their work. It needs artists who live.
So I left. I traded candlelit tragedy for a well-lit grocery store. I let my suffering go cold. I chose something radical: a full stomach, a stable paycheck.
Sleep.
And I feared—God, I feared—that I was betraying something sacred, that I was closing a door I could never reopen.
But I wrote. And I kept writing. And I learned that art, real art, does not require suffering. It requires perspective.
So to you, my fellow artists, still wrapped in the mythology of the grind, still believing that starvation makes the work more pure—let me tell you this: You do not have to prove your devotion by diminishing yourself. You do not have to bleed onto the page just to feel worthy of the words.
Make art. Make it messy. Make it joyful. Make it angry, make it loud, make it soft and delicate and bursting with color. But do not make it the reason you disappear.
One of us has to live.
I volunteer.
And I hope, in time, you will too.