Or, as the late actor Douglas Campbell advises, "when there is nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire."
Interpretations of this line, which opens the 2004 album Set Yourself On Fire by the alt-pop band Stars, generally revolve around concepts of isolating yourself through burned bridges until you are all that remains to be destroyed.
***
A literal lifetime ago I was once well known as a wordsmith. Besides my decorated high school journalism “career” I fancied myself a prose writer fashioned after Cisneros or Kerouac, prolific in navel-gazing public confessionals through the golden age of LiveJournal. I even attended open-mic readings at the local boho cafe, rattling off poetry scribbled frantically on drugstore receipts and parking tickets earlier that same day.
I kept sketch diaries and idea books. I penned songs and stashed them in a packet in my guitar case. I gathered fodder for collages, snapped high-res digital photos. I maintained a personal website that I designed and hand-coded myself. I experimented with sewing and painting.
I shared all of it at the time, without shame or self-consciousness, without concern for response or validation.
In spite of all the ambitions and potential I’ve held in my younger years, and the happiness it brought me to express myself regardless of audience, I’ve spent perhaps too long since then in a state of creative dormancy. I’ve been steamrolled by millennial coming-of-age: crushed under waves of economic and social turmoil, bled dry by capitalism’s demands in the name of survival. Not to mention the fight to keep up with such rapid, often unsavory, changes in how art is created and evaluated.
Like many others experienced in the turn of this decade, I found myself once again deeply uncomfortable with this stasis. The pandemic era stirred within me a feeling of feral restlessness and fatigue, like an animal who wore herself out trying to break out of captivity. I cannot forget my nature but I also cannot indulge it — at least not in earnest, not with the limited resources I have. “Not in this economy.”
The challenge of navigating creative endeavors seems insurmountable after feeling as though I’ve fallen overboard in a tempest and desperately washed up on the shores of corporate employment. Pushing through the suffocating effects of impostor syndrome and the guilt of wasting my own potential — and re-submitting this battered version of myself to the mortifying ordeal of being known — sounds as painful as setting myself on fire.
But as sad as that is to think about at first, I’ve begun to find it incredibly liberating to realize that there is no longer anything at stake for me creatively.
Memories of the fecund little hellion I once was feel more like a rumor now, a myth. It has been so long that I no longer have a reputation to uphold or expectations to meet. Essentially no one I know now is truly aware of the person I used to think I would be. I can simply be born again.
***
As I gazed at the blank page before me today, attempting my very first Medium story, I considered the choice of fire in that aforementioned Douglas Campbell quote as the method of self-destruction as opposed to something more maudlin. Wouldn’t it be so much more sumptuous to drown, more poignant to fade or disintegrate?
Just what is it that makes setting yourself on fire so different, so appealing?
I envision it less in the monastic, altruistic-sacrificial sense, but rather in the sense of cleansing fire, as holy as nature itself is holy. Flames diligently clearing the debris blanketing the forest floor, enlivening the soil below, coaxing the seeds of pyrophilic pines to awaken.
Let me eschew the clichés of loneliness and lost love in this quote, and instead be that forest awaiting a massive, invigorating blaze. Let the flames lap away at my branches weighted with brittle, useless needles. Let the layers of detritus smothering the earth instead turn to nourishing ash.
Let me hold tightly to the knowledge that I am the sleeping seed exposed beneath the decay. The searing heat is no more pain than it is a kiss of life.
Since I have nothing else to lose — to burn — may I be a phoenix rising from the embers of my self-immolation.
