By Elisa Penha

Edited by Alloe Mak

Over the last year, I have written twice about an old friend of mine who took his own life. Though it still does not feel like I have written enough, I worry I’ve exhausted the trauma. Is there an expiry date for when you should stop feeling deeply for some ancient hurt? How long is too long to be still spinning prose on the same, tired tragedies? There is still so much I feel I haven’t said about him, but I am so paralyzed by the idea of becoming derivative in my works that I will stifle my own thoughts and choose another one of my problems to weave into a carefully curated personal essay. But what happens when I run out of awful things to write about? We have been conditioned to believe poignant art can only stem from the most morose of lives, and so I feel I am ticking my traumas off a list in the name of it. I have already written about girlhood, and motherhood, and poverty, and mental illness. And when my privilege trumps my sorrow, when I have no more deep and thought-provoking ailments to use in my art, do I repeat them all again? Who wants to read about somebody who is happy?

I remember seeing a post: “can someone break Bruno Mars’s heart so he can drop some sad music?” I wondered what it must take to torture yourself so that you may have enough heart-wrenching material to become a success. Starving artists who are fed do not seem much like artists at all, only creative people eating well, and invading a space of sadness that does not belong to them. But how is this profitable? If your tragic art earns you fame and thereby makes you happy, but you are not allowed to now revel in your happiness, do you become stagnant until something hurts you again? I think this might be why we fawn over artists who only flourished after they died. Only death can save them from the error of hubris, because they are not around anymore to watch themselves become a success. The Vincent Van Goghs, the Franz Kafkas, and the Emily Dickinsons are revered for their lives of aching pain, and the beautiful works they managed to manifest in spite of it. Why must we only validate the art that stems from suffering?

I feel fraudulent for being a mostly-happy writer. How can anything I say about hardships be taken seriously if I am so well-off? I remember a comedy show: Daniel Sloss joking that he loathes his parents for not abusing him, thereby not giving him sufficient material with which he could be funny. I remember being young and wishing that I might break a bone so I’d have more sad experiences to make myself a more well-rounded person. (I did, eventually, break my wrist, and I’m not sure it changed me all too much.) I remember, most of all, the cries of adults: telling us we are dull because we have not been sufficiently tormented, and I wondered why wisdom, too, must be equated to how much pain we have endured. I do not want to continue to live in misery, but what else is there that might afford me literary credibility? If I allow myself to write only of what makes me happy, and what has made my life delightful instead of agonizing, will readers become bored with my braggadocio? Will they scoff at my love stories and ignore my tales of triumph in favour of my trauma? I love to write of that which pains me, but I worry it will soon become all I am able to do. Sarah Rees Brennan writes, “You met me when I was sad, but I’m not a sad person, and I don’t want you to like that sad person who wasn’t me more than you like me.” 

I once read a poem; a translation of Missed Time by Ha Jin: “My notebook has remained blank for months thanks to the light you shower around me. I have no use for my pen, which lies languorously without grief. Nothing is better than to live a storyless life that needs no writing for meaning—when I am gone, let others say they lost a happy man, though no one can tell how happy I was.” 

I know I will still live through sadnesses which will allow me to pen novels. But I fear I will allow heartache to define me because of my fear of irrelevance. Our world wants artists to suffer, and so I will not. Let me talk instead of something wonderful. My pleasant stories do not weaken me. I do not want my talent to hinge on how well I am able to break hearts with the wretched stories of my life. I love and I am loved and this merits poetry just as much as my grief. I long for comfort and I often have it, and this is a miracle worth writing of too. I am happy sometimes and I hope to be happy most times. I hope that one day I find I have nothing to write about at all.