Good Art

At first the scar bothered me. It sat right at the center of my neck, and when my hair was down it was a perfectly framed reminder. It had a slight curve to it, just enough to be noticable if you stared at it. Stare at it was all I could do. I couldn't think. I couldn't utter the words, you have cancer.
Normally I get some sort of satisfaction when I am right, even if it is grim news. Typically I can find some small comfort in the fact that my iniution did not fail me. This time that gilmer of self gradification didn't come. Neither did normalcy. 
The doctors were calm as they explained everything. I was never told the stage, I was never given a lifespan. I wasn't going to have chemo. I felt a little cheated. All the buzz words you normally hear with cancer, that people can understand, I was denied. Instead I was given a whole different vocabulary, one that not many have heard before and can be quiet daunting at times.
I dove into this vocabulary, into this world of my illness. How could I not? I didn't belong with the regular cancer patients, and I most deffinately didn't belong with the healthy people. I was in my own bleak world, and nothing could take me away from it.
It hasn't been until the last two days and a simple phrase that I've truly started to heal from this entire thing.
"Make good art."-Neil Gaiman
That phrase in away has saved my life. It at least has saved me from succumbing to this disease. I'm not sure what my bestfriend and I were talking about when he advised me to look up the speach that phrase is from. I was probably droning on and on ad nasum about how utterly terrible my existance had become. He suggested I listen to Mr. Gaiman's speach. I was moved, and yet at the same time I was hurting. My future was all determinded now on if I could get affordable healthcare, my daily existance depends on a multitude of medicines and the doctors who perscribe them. How could I make good art when I couldn't go out and be an artist?
So I set my self a challenge, make as many creations as you can each day. Do not judge them.Just create them.
So here I am, creating, making, healing. This may not be art that is pleasing to others, but it is good art. It is good art because its creation helped its creator heal from a dibilitating disease. Art will not provide me the hormones my body now needs to survive, art will not make food magically appear on my table, art will not always make me instantly happy. But what art does is inviable to my life, and my greatest hope that my art is not just good for me, but it is also good for you. That it moves you, shakes you, pushes you, and sends you on a journey that you might not otherwise have found. And if my art does not do this for you, that somewhere in the world there is art that does.