Maybe I should go to prison to focus on my art

Some people go on silent retreats to find themselves. Others take long, meditative walks through nature. A select few pack up their lives, move to a foreign country, and declare, This is where I shall reinvent myself.

Me? I think prison might be the answer.

Three meals a day, no rent, no worries and responsibility to distract me, and an abundance of time to finally focus on my art. Solitude, discipline, and—depending on the crime—possibly even assault and battery.

My current lifestyle isn’t exactly leading me toward a criminal record. My most dangerous habit is impulse-buying and laughing at my own jokes. I laugh until I feel tired. I am often sad and tired.

Restlessness is exhausting. Especially when it feels like I'm wasting my life and I don't exactly know what to do with it. Time is marching forward and I feel like it is leaving me behind. I want to be an artist.

A wordsmith. I want to leave a legacy and make something of myself but the world reminds me that I don’t belong in it. So I blame the distractions. I excuse my own laziness.

I am stubborn and too closed off. I self deprecate and feel unworthy. Perhaps the best thing I can do is commit a crime. So then I'd go to prison and focus on my art.
Or maybe I should move to a remote monastery, shave my head, and write poetry about the wind. Or fake my own death and live under an alias in a dimly lit Parisian attic, surviving on cheap wine and existential dread. But no, that would be too easy.

Instead, I stay here—dragging myself through the motions of an ordinary life, filling my bag with fries and sticky notes, like a lunatic, laughing at my own jokes like a comedian with no audience. I tell myself I'm too distracted to create, maybe, I am simply afraid. Afraid that if I give it my all and still fail, I will have nothing left to hide behind. No distractions. No laziness. No excuses about needing absolute solitude (or, apparently, incarceration) to produce something worthwhile.

And yet, for reasons beyond my own understanding, I keep writing. Even when I claim I have nothing to say. Even when I insist that I am tired, uninspired, and entirely unremarkable. Even when I am convinced that existence itself is nothing but misery, played on the overly sentimental.

I write. Not because I believe it will save me, but because I don’t know what else to do with my hands.