At the end of March 2010, I became cute.
I’ve been told since that the trait has a much more extensive history, but I’m convinced that until my ukulele playing and my year in France and my parents’ (epically poorly timed) divorce and my discovery of scarves all aligned, the cuteness lay contentedly dormant.
Then I wrote The Hug Song.
Hands switching from uke to crayon and paper and back again, I composed what I went on to realize was the cutest thing I had ever been exposed to.
I was bewildered. I had never been cute before, and this thing, in its incomprehensible cuteness, had been written by me. In crayon.
My cuteness had been nudged awake – and it did not take long to discover its strength.
Eight months later, and I can objectively and confusedly say that I am consistently adorable.
My latest song is proof.
A week or so after I wrote A Non-Romantic Love Song for the World, I made a fairly shitty recording of it in Garage Band and sent it to Troy, a dear friend for whose input I have the utmost respect (and who, incidentally, was around for The Hug Song’s inception).
“Your voice,” Troy wrote, “is the perfect medium for these notes, which are honest and spot-on.”
My face broke into a smile that I can only describe as the result of achieving a goal one was never even aware of having had.
The effect was not intentional – but it was far from coincidental.
My belief: Every idea, every thought, every feeling has a superlatively genuine mode of expression.
When artists create, the ideas being expressed are often universal – and it’s when those ideas, so often called cliché, are expressed most honestly that something beautiful is made.
After all, what we feel unites us. It’s how we feel it that makes us who we are.
And it’s not limited to artists. All of us have something in us – call it joy, love, passion, whatever – some abstract thing that connects us all.
We just all have different ways of living it, different actions that take the joy in us and bring it to the grins on our faces and the inexpressible rightness in our hearts.
We need only find it – find it and fight for it, through the pain and frustration and difficulty it might bring. (It’s just the kind of pain/frustration/difficulty that’s worth it.)
These lives aren't ones to achieve; they're ones to strive for. Constantly.
These lives, to me, the fun ones, the rewarding ones and the ones with the most love and joy and passion, all self-replicating.
These lives are the source of beauty.
