You don’t know. You don’t know what it takes—what it truly costs—to be an artist.

It’s not about skill. It’s not about fame or aesthetics or education. It is something much deeper, more intimate, and infinitely more painful. To create real art, you must sit down with your entire being exposed.

You open your heart—rawly, vulnerably—with everything that made you: from the stone that once solidified your spirit to the sand you’ve slowly crumbled into. To be an artist is not a choice made lightly. It is a unique, delicate experience of the soul.

People—especially scholars and thinkers—often wonder: what compels someone to live in that state? To stand there, in that fragile mental, emotional, and even physical condition, just to sing, to write, or to paint? It seems irrational, impractical, even masochistic. Yet artists continue to do it. Over and over again.

And so, the real question arises—not what is art, but why is art?

Philosophers through the ages may have differed in their definitions of beauty, truth, and form, but many of them agreed on one thing: art is not a luxury. It is not decoration. It is a necessity for the soul.

Creating art is like performing open-heart surgery on yourself. There is no anesthesia. No instruction manual. No other hands to hold the scalpel but your own. It is a deeply self-aware process. You open your wounds. You confront them. You give them names. You track their origins, their reasons, and their pain. And if you have reached a level of spiritual or emotional transcendence, you begin to heal them—not with bandages, but with color, word, tone, or movement.

A painting may be nothing more than pain thrown up in color. A poem might be a structured breakdown. A song might be the chant of someone desperate not to drown. Yet in the act of creating, something remarkable happens: the wound speaks, and in doing so, it begins to close. This is why honesty is the most sacred principle in art. Without it, the process is imitation. But with it, the process becomes transformation.

To be an artist is to exist between states. Not fully alive, not fully dead. Like a surgeon performing an autopsy, except the body on the table is your own soul. And unlike a real autopsy, you’re awake the entire time.

The artist stands between the living and the dead, holding pieces of a self that has suffered, a self that has endured. And they know it. They live with this awareness. They create from it. They don’t just observe life—they process it through every cell of their being, transforming their personal suffering into something that transcends the self.

This process is not always noble. It is often tormenting. And so the question must be asked again: Why would anyone willingly do this to themselves?

Why is art worth the pain?

The answer is paradoxical. Art may appear, at times, to serve no practical purpose. It does not always feed, clothe, or shelter. But it serves something higher—something sacred.

Art is the purpose.

It’s not pointless—it is so purposeful, so full of truth and resonance, that it cannot be measured by common standards. It doesn’t require intelligence in the traditional sense. It requires sensitivity. Awareness. The courage to feel deeply, to understand beauty not with the mind, but with the soul.

And that is why the results are often breathtaking. Literally and metaphorically. A true work of art can leave you stunned, silent, unable to speak—not because you don’t understand it, but because you feel it completely. It is a translation of the human condition, of inner suffering and wonder, into something we can see, touch, hear, or read.

Art is rebirth and cleansing.

Art is not always about creating something new. Often, it is about repairing something broken. The artist becomes midwife to their own rebirth, cleansing the trauma collected from birth to the present moment.

Every honest piece of art is a ritual. A painting. A poem. A song. A story.

Each one holds within it the story of a soul choosing to live again. Each one says, "Hurt me. Here is what made me. Here is what I still carry.”

“Here is what art allows what is invisible inside to take shape outside. And in doing so, the artist releases what might otherwise have destroyed them.”

What’s even more extraordinary is that this process doesn’t end with the artist. When someone with a pure or kindred soul encounters such art—when they see the painting, read the poem, hear the song—they recognize it.

It resonates. It infects. It heals them too.

This is the divine contagion of beauty: its ability to transcend language, culture, and intellect and speak directly to the human soul. It awakens something ancient within us—a memory, a sense, a truth we may have forgotten. It reminds us that we are more than flesh and routine. We are, at our core, intelligent, calm, and lofty souls. We came from a sacred source, and to that source we will return.

Art, then, is not entertainment. It is not performance. It is a sacred autopsy of the soul.

To be an artist is to stand in that sacred space, knife in hand, truth on tongue, wounds exposed, and to create not because it is painless—but because it is necessary.

It is rebirth. It is cleansing. It is truth.

And to witness true art is to remember, even for a fleeting moment, that you are alive—not just biologically, but spiritually. That you have a soul. And that soul is worthy of being seen, understood, and loved. So the next time you stand in front of a painting, or hear a lyric that makes your throat tighten, or read a line that echoes something you’ve never said out loud—remember:

This is someone’s wound. This is someone’s resurrection. This is why art.