Disclaimer: I’m not trying to feed into the stereotype, rather I’m trying to dispell the stereotype because it’s truth. Art needs gloom.

Before we talk about gloom, let’s talk about the other end of the spectrum - happiness.

Have you experienced happiness? No, I’m not talking about contentment, try again. No, I’m not talking about excitement. No no not even about absence of sadness. Not being thoughtless, not the empty mind. Eh, not exactly worriless either.

May I share my two cents?

Happiness is that feeling you get when you’re all of it at once - overwhelmed, the feeling of constrictedness rising in your throat, making your head buzz. Your chest feels heavily compressed, and then suddenly lighter, and you’re feeling warm, sweaty, and there’s tears in your eyes. You can’t stop it, you can’t even make a legible sound, you’re just sobbing, trembling, your vision is blurred, you need to hold on to something for support —

… sounds familiar? Astonishingly like other feeling that we’re all aware of, no? Despair, sadness. At their peaks, it seems that both these emotions invoke the same bodily responses. You feel light afterwards, in both cases. The only big difference - and this difference is enough to change the game ladies and gentlemen - is the domain of thoughts that race through your mind, on loop, again and again, as you experience either emotion.

These thoughts often get implanted in your mind at a deeper level. After the feelings pass, after you’ve either bawled your eyes out in a hysteria of laughs and sobs, snotty noze and sweaty forehead and palms included, or sat still staring at the wall sobbing silently until the stinging passes; you feel a momentary bliss…and then come the thoughts. Strangely calm, subdued. The background music has set in. You are forced to set aside your immediate thoughts, and carry on with your day. What impact did that episode have on you?

Many of us are too busy to feel. Few of us take the time out to think about the feeling. And even fewer, are able to take that pain and find avenues of expression in creation.

The gloom is an emotion. It ain’t necessarily sad, it’s more like being aware, and ironically makes you more pragmatic. It grounds you, and shows you the world in more ways than you can imagine. Gloom is what sets in after a heavy episode of both happiness and despair. I believe it is one of the highest forms of feeling - because it is one of the rawest and truest human experience. You could argue that love is the strongest emotion, or hatred is, but these are all the heated ones. The peak of these emotions only occur momentarily, but not gloom - it is ocean that allows the waves of heated emotions to ride on it.

Gloom stops time, shows you dimensions much beyond what one might ordinarily see. It puts your mind in that state like you’ve just stepped out after washing your hair and you feel all cozy and shivery with the contrast of your cold head clashing interanlly with your warm skin and insides! (is that too specific an example? T_T) Gloom allows you to observe, allows you to observe yourself as you observe, and remember it in an abstract form that connects you with art. And because it’s attached to an emotion, it is etched into your memory, so you can access fragrances of it when you get into performance mode.

Someties, the artist heals. Give them money, they either “stabilize” or take themselves to ruin. If they do apparently stabilize, they don’t stay there for long. Because it’s like taking away the mind’s ability to see half the colors of the visible spectrum. It’s like reducing your essence, your BEING, into something condensed, something LESSER. WHY! Society today doesn’t know what it means to heal. Healing is confused with rewriting of emotions, of becoming devoid, empty, and without. Tell me mate, how can you expect a kite to keep flying if you cut off the very string that’s navigating it across the sky?

Unable to bear the loss, the artist’s mind doesn’t find a tether, and in search of that very part of their souls that they’ve lost, they’re taken down the path of more ruin, and subsequently more art and beauty, and then, ultimately, and unfortunately, the end. Like a comet, it looks the most beautiful when it burns the brightest.

Either that, or they continue to live in pursuit of something greater, and the pursuit is itself the journey that gets the artist to loose themselves, and find themselves again, and again, and again, in different ways.

Everytime they lose themselves, they hit a new high in terms of art, and create masterpieces that humanity beholds in awe.

After all, everything comes with a pricetag, and one must always pay their dues. To be able to see more, comes with a price too. But hey! The good news is, you can always choose your fights! Because without your fight, without your purpose, are you even fully living? Come, trade your monotony for some emotion (: