to new beginnings...

call this the transformation, if you will

The Art of New Beginnings

There’s a limit to it all—to the lives you can live in your head, to the dreams you can snuff out with your hands. Sometimes there’s too much blood from those dead dreams that they become a permanent red stain on your hand. There’s something like too much noise from the never-ending clock in your mind. And yet, you have limited time. There is only so much time.

I’m writing this in a frenzy, and I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I can still hear Owen’s scream from, I Saw the TV Glow—that primal, haunting sound – a mirror of my own struggle. It reminds me that I’m stuck. Stuck in the same place I was years ago when I wrote Graveyard of Dreams. There’s blood on my hands, and I’m slowly turning to a graveyard of dreams. Nothing’s changed, and I hate that.

I feel like tearing my chest open, maybe a new me could burst out from within, and we could start this all over.

---

I’m sitting here, sniffling from a bad case of catarrh, surrounded by the cacophony of TikTok. Silence would be a blessing, but here I am, still trying to write in this chaos.

I just watched Whiplash, the scenes of the bloodied hands still furiously playing the drums in his obsession with perfection still playing in my head, and now Kanye West’s Through the Wire is playing—a song he made with his jaw wired shut after reconstructive surgery. I chuckled a bit at the irony: even when it hurt to speak, he kept creating.

I promised myself I’d be obsessed this year. I wrote about it here, and tried to be committed to it. But I’m exhausted. I’m tired of waiting for the right time, pushing everything off until tomorrow, till a distant future where I’ll seemingly get it all done.

I hate this. Staring at a blank page, hoping for the words to come. I hate this because I have a headache, but here I am, still forcing myself to write. I hate this because it forces me to confront my mediocrity.

They say you need to accept that greatness won’t come on the first try. You won’t become a god by drinking the nectar of the gods once. That you should be comfortable with going through many drafts before you get something you feel comfortable with. And I understand. I promised to be like that. Be forgiving of my inadequacies. But still, I find the thought gnawing at me with each word I write: This isn’t good enough. You are better than this.

And now I’m contemplating slamming my laptop shut, and go back to scrolling mindlessly through Twitter, but I can’t. I don’t want to.

I’m thinking again about Owen’s scream when he realized that he has let his dreams slip through his fingers like sand. His face in the mirror as he sliced his chest open, waiting for the brightness of a new Owen to consume and save him.

I am there now. Once more slicing my chest open, waiting to be saved by the me that I have refused to let out.

---

Act II

I’ve been obsessed with Kanye’s debut album, The College Dropout, ever since watching his documentary. In Spaceship, he says, “Made three beats a day each summer, I deserve to do these numbers.” He’s arrogant. An arrogance that’s earned, and I believe in that. An arrogance born from an unshakable belief that you’re a genius, that no one else can do what you do.

God, my thoughts are spiraling again. What am I really trying to say here?

That I’m starting again. That this time, there are only two options: greatness or die trying. God knows how many versions of myself I’ll have to create and kill in the process. The headache is getting worse.

This is the art of new beginnings.

I’ve been holding on to this essay for weeks because I can’t find the perfect words to capture the art of new beginnings. A quote, a scene from my favourite movie, a line from Hozier’s songs. But there was nothing, and I hate that. This has to be perfect because it is a new beginning. The start of another journey where I get to write my three essays a day just to push my limits. The stage where I’m obsessed with one thing and one thing only; excellence. One where at the end of it all, I can come out with an arrogance that isn’t empty, but one that is earned – like Kanye. At the end of this, when everyone is saying the success is surprising, I want to look at them straight in the eyes and say; “Not to me.”

But I cannot find the perfect ending, so I’ll just leave this Bible verse here with the hope that it’ll be enough:

Mark 2 v 22: And no man putteth new wine into old bottles: else the new wine doth burst the bottles, and the wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred: but new wine must be put into new bottles.

---