A high tolerance for suffering is needed to make art. It’s a painful endeavor. Requiring a divine discipline. An unbroken focus. 

Despite the suffering one must endure to make art, artists aren’t respected as serious workers of an intense trade. Their livelihood appears to be secured through playing. Making life a game. 

That is only the perception, but in reality, artists spend their days aching with an endless tension. Carrying the weight of every idea, made and unmade. 

With a brain inflamed by electricity they make decisions that will affect their life. And maybe their families lives. And maybe the lives of an entire culture. 

They carry that burden every ticking second until the clock stops. 

At night, when the world goes into deep slumber, I quietly wonder how many great writers died miserable. Broken men who were once filled with immaculate purpose and a drive that placed them in arm’s reach to paradise. 

Sadly, man is born to visit Eden, not live there. No one knows this better than my favorite writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Best known for writing The Great Gatsby in 1925. F. Scott was 29 years old then. Rich, famous, married to the woman of his dreams, and living out his every fantasy during waking hours. 

By 40 he had lost it all. The acclaim, the money, the woman, but the most damaging loss was his confidence. Too many unfocused nights and undisciplined weeks. Months of hard drinking and nauseous doubt. 

“He was a failure the rest of his days,”  wrote Michel Mok of Fitzgerald in 1935. 

The profile, titled, “The Other Side of Paradise, Scott Fitzgerald, 40, Engulfed in Despair.” has a quote that I sometimes think about: 

“A series of things happened to papa,” he said, with mock brightness. “So papa got depressed and started drinking a little.”

What the “things” were he refused to explain. 

“One blow after another,” he said, “and finally something snapped.” 

Artists do snap. They do break. The intense pressure to perform will burn the artist out of the very fire that made them hot. Becoming a skeleton doing a trick. Everyone afraid to say the bottles are empty. That there is no more lightning. 

by Yoh