Take Your Pain and Turn it into Art

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One important thing never taught in schools is to deal with our emotions, to deal with pain…

Recently, when I was going through a tough emotional situation, I was reminded of something I had heard many years ago: “Take your pain and turn it into art”.

So instead of sitting around and analysing the situation from 100 different angles, I decided to do something about it.

I sat down to write a song, having previously experienced the therapeutic effects of channelising painful emotions into art. In the past I had written posts and songs about my painful experiences which changed my perspective about them and helped me feel better.

So I took my journal and started writing. But probably because I was trying to write a song in general and not really being honest about how I felt, it didn’t seem to be heading in any meaningful direction, so I stopped.

An hour later, as I was playing the guitar, I stumbled upon a tune I liked and the first few lines of a song slowly started to emerge as I sang along to the chords.

After I completed writing the song around 45 minutes later, I had attained a new found clarity and closure about the whole situation.

You see what was troubling me was that I had expressed my feelings to a girl that I liked, but she didn’t reciprocate those feelings.

She had gotten out of a relationship few months ago and said that she couldn’t see herself developing feelings for anyone right now.

Whatever the reason was it was difficult to hear.

I didn’t want to give up to easily. I decided to wait a month and try again.

I wrote her a long letter and even recorded a video of me playing one of my songs for her “Take a Chance on Me” (a song I had written before I knew her), which coincidentally conveyed exactly what I wanted to tell her.

While she did have some nice things to say, her response was still basically the same.

Well, that’s how life can be sometimes. As Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones sang:

“You can't always get what you want

You can't always get what you want

But if you try sometime you'll find

You get what you need”

Sometimes the best thing you can do is believe what has happened is for the best, despite how badly you wished it would have turned out differently.

Too many times I’ve found that mentally resisting what’s happening in life is guaranteed to make you miserable. Acceptance of the situation on the other hand, can be healing.

So instead of merely talking about “turning your pain into art” I thought I will show you what I created. Here is the song "Moving On" that I ended up writing.

Here is a short and raw glimpse of the song.

Moving On

I don't want you to go

I've done everything

To keep you in my life

Oh won't you stay right here with me?

I miss you girl

And the midnight walks we took

Oh tell me darling

is this the end for us?

Don't keep me guessing

Cause I wanna move on

Do I have a chances

Should I try one last time?

Oh I've made up my mind now

I'm not coming back this time You hurt my soul

But it's stronger than you'll ever know

I've been doing some thinking

And I wish you the best

But maybe it's best

That we go our separate ways

You can see that mood of that the song is not the same from start to end. The change in the mood of the song actually reflects the change in my state of my mind by the time I was done writing.

I have no words to explain, but writing and creating the song made me feel so much better. I don’t know how art works its magic, but I do know that it works.

Turning your pain into art can involve any art form whether that’s writing, painting, making music, poetry, story-telling, stand-up comedy, photography…

Choose whatever works best for you.

Now I have to say opening up about my feelings for public consumption isn’t easy. When I sat down to write this post, I had no intention of revealing so much about my life or doing a recording of the song.

But if there is someone out there who sees this and feels better, I guess it will be worth it. As you go about channelling your pain into art, in case you are wondering whether to share it publicly, it will be helpful to keep this in mind.

Now before you go, I would like to share something I saw recently in a second hand book store that may help you to look at pain from a better perspective. 

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