If you want to be a creator, you have to be a killer

Show me your teeth

Spirit told me you forgot you’re a killer.

Spirit told me you forgot you’re a predator.

Spirit told me you forgot that your job is not only to bring Life, but to bring Death.

And we just can’t have that. We can’t have you walking around like Glenda the Good Witch, all love ‘n’ light and shit. We can’t have you thinking that your job is just to lift everyone’s spirit and make everyone feel comfortable all the time. Because I don’t care how saccharine sweet your message is, if you’re being as loud about your art as I need you to be—screaming it out on the internet for everyone to hear—eventually, it will piss somebody off.

As an artist, your job is to destroy what stands in the way of expressing your own perspective. Including and especially the perspectives and ideas you’ve allowed to colonize you. And when your message pisses someone off, you’re alerting them to what’s colonized their creative channel. You’re putting a big, fat finger on something that’s ready to be killed off. To be destroyed.

But sometimes, instead of rising to that challenge, using our triggers to empower ourselves and reconnect with our own creative instinct, we collapse underneath it. Instead of destroying what’s asking to be destroyed inside, we try to destroy the trigger.

Instead of killing whatever’s rotting inside us and using its reclaimed parts to Frankenstein a new vision, we prop up the corpse and start puppeteering it.

So let’s talk about how you can better respond to these triggers and how you can reclaim your own creative power in the face of those who want to snuff it out.

Reigning in your killer instinct

When I see something I disagree with, something that seems to threaten my own identity and worldview, I like to start by taking a step back and asking myself, “is this for me? Am I the intended audience of this post/article/art piece?”

Often, I realize that me and that original poster actually do agree—we’re just coming at things from different angles. Or perhaps it’s a case of two things being true. We’re all living in our own reality tunnels. What works for me might not work for you. What’s true in my world might not hold water in yours.

Whether that post is for me or not, it is putting me in contact with something that wants to be created and something that wants to be destroyed. So the next question is, “what part of me is triggering this killer instinct? What is ready to die?”

Sometimes, it’s simply the part of me that believes this is true or accurate to my experience—or that this should be my experience. Sometimes it’s the part of me that senses a bigger truth, one that supersedes that other person’s truth. Sometimes, it’s the part of me that knows what that person is saying isn’t even true at all.

So if that’s not true—in my world or any world—what is true? The question becomes, “what is asking to be created? What is available to be expressed?”

This is where you take what you don’t like or don’t resonate with and fashion it into something that’s yours.

This is where you take control of your own worldview and what your Genius wants to create from that perspective.

Sometimes this process is purely reactionary but it doesn’t have to stay that way. You’re free to take whatever information you glean from this trigger and allow it to evolve—mixing and remixing it with other perspectives and ideas outside of yours and the one that appears to threaten it.

Instead of forming your vision in opposition to something, you get to form it in inspiration of something.

This is, in my opinion, the more creative path. Because anything formed as a reaction is always going to contain the essence of what it has reacted to. Light contains the dark because it is the absence of dark, and vice versa. When you form your vision in opposition to something, not only does it lack originality—given that it exists to not be something else—it tends to lack rigor. You often end up with a flaccid, impotent shadow of a more personal invention that doesn’t very effectively meet your audience’s needs. If anything, the American two-party political system illustrates this perfectly.

The invitation here is to take your distaste for something and channel it into a proactive, procreative response to reality rather than a disorganized and discordant one. You put your inner predator on a leash and show them a more effective direction for their attack.

But when we focus so much on the creative response and marginalize the destructive one, we start fearing the effect our art will have on others and thinking it’s our job to be constructive all the time. We forcibly yoke our killer instinct to its more productive counterpart and micromanage our inner predator into oblivion.

We become overly apologetic and take excessive responsibility for what happens when we put that art out in the world.

In order to find some balance, we have to talk about letting the killer loose.

Going for the jugular

Your job is not to speak to every single reality, every single paradoxical truth. It’s so easy to forget that in an age where everybody is so goddamn obsessed with nUaNcE. Don’t mistake my meaning, I love nuance. I love complexity. I love capturing the various dimensions of something. For chrisssake, I don’t just live in a gray area, I named myself after it.

But our fixation on nuance has turned into a demand that you personally validate every person all the time. You should never speak directly, declaratively, decisively about something otherwise you risk suggesting that you think your truth is the only truth.

But that, my loves, is a projection. People who don’t secretly believe there’s One Truth to Rule Them All don’t usually feel the need to tell someone else theirs is wrong. When someone has a dramatic reaction to your truth and feels the need to combat it with theirs, you can bet they’ve already fallen all the way down that well.

When you try to speak to every single perspective, you scatter your energy and dilute your message. You also dilute your authority.

Your personal expression requires full commitment. It requires complete trust that this is the thing you’re here to say, so there’s no point in mincing words about it.

This is something I learned in acting. If you want the audience on your side, you can’t be afraid to embarrass yourself. You can’t be afraid to be wrong. You have to be completely immersed in the task at hand; rooted so deeply in the point of view you’re trying to convey that you deliver the most accurate, robust, full-bodied portrait you’re capable of. Because if you don’t trust yourself, if you don’t believe in what you’re here to express, why should anyone else? If you’re showing up with a grimace and a shrug, you’re communicating to your audience that they should lower their expectations. So you can’t be surprised when they decide to sneak out the exit door before the curtain falls.

You could change your mind tomorrow and take it all back. You could come back for next week’s performance with something totally new to offer. That’s a problem for future You. For right now, trust yourself enough to exude confidence in what you know to be true. Say what you have to say and let people who feel their identity and worldview disrupted get royally pissed off.

Embracing your inner evil

Remember how I said opposites always contain the essence of each other? Well, your creative instinct isn’t just connected to your killer instinct; your desire to create is made up of a desire to destroy.

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In order to plant your message in the fertile ground of another’s consciousness, you have to rip up whatever’s taking space in their garden. Whether we like it or not, effective art acts as a bulldozer. Once you roll up to your audience’s fence, it’s up to them whether they want to let you in or not. And if they choose to swing that gate wide, they can’t be mad at you for destroying shit.

The fact of the matter is that your kinky, shadowy parts love eating up people’s gardens. They want to take a big bite out of that apple and leave the scraps for the next person to deal with.

And who are you to tell them they’re wrong?

Who are you to tell them they need to contort their art into some kind of kumbaya free-for-all—letting anyone and everyone who might see things differently than you colonize your creative expression?

Nah. Fuck that shit. Be a killer.

For all the people who proclaim to be in their “villain era,” I see very few of them willing to allow others’ villainy to exist. Not very villain of you, sweetheart.

A true villain revels in everyone’s evil. A true villain knows that the enemy of my enemy is my friend and their only true enemy is a lack of freedom. When a villain feels threatened by someone else’s art, they remember who the fuck they are and make their own art bigger.

If you’re really ‘bout that Trickster life, you’ve gotta be an agent of chaos; creative chaos. You have to know how to channel your anger instead of letting it leak out on others who are being unapologetically themselves.

Instead of blowing your load anytime someone else’s sovereignty triggers you, you save it, savor it, cultivate that energy and direct it towards your own expression.

Instead of being a walking toddler tantrum, be an artist, bitch.

It’s time to recognize your creativity for what it is, a tool for self-empowerment. Next week, we’ll talk about how you can use your inner predator to discover that power.

This is a 4-part series. To read the next entry, click here. To peep the full series, click here.

Join the discussion!

Q: What is your greatest fear in sharing your art and how has your inner villain helped you conquer it?