I Use The 3 Dot Thing... A Lot

I use the 3 dot thing… a lot. I don’t remember the name of it. I know there’s some grammatical name for it… and I also know that I use it incorrectly because it’s supposed to be used to show the omission of a word, but I use it to show a pause (sorry all my English teaching friends). But I also don’t care. I’m writing… a lot. And it feels really good. I’m finally using writing as a tool to express myself, tell stories, and share with others. Sometimes I purposely use poor grammar, misspell things, etc, to get a point across… annndd sometimes I’m just too ignorant to know the difference.

Before you jump all over me, let me say this, I’m an artist. On top of that I’m an art teacher, with a masters degree. I grew up painting and drawing all the time, went to school for 6 years to be professionally trained on how to teach art, and have taught it for 7 years. You know what’s really confusing about art? There are no rules! Nothing is concrete! It’s always changing, and the main goal behind it isn’t that you’re ‘doing things right’, it’s that you’re expressing yourself. It doesn’t take that much effort to make a copy of the Mona Lisa or Starry Night. I’ve seen high schoolers and middle schoolers do that. Loads of people can do it. You don’t even have to be a professional. But only one person was original enough create it first. There’s only one person who can say that that was their original idea, and that was actually an expression of where they were in life and in their career at that time.

It’s the same way with all art, all creativity, and I dare say all of life. Rules are subjective. Rules are cultural. And there’s too many of them. I mean… they’re only rules because a majority of people agree with them. If, however, you want to be someone innovative, creative, and make things that are original, there is no other way than to break a few rules. It’s impossible not to… If you go along the path of creativity long enough you will stumble through breaking all kinds of rules. You may even break some that you didn’t mean to.

It’s too hard to follow every rule. Some rules even contradict themselves. It’s too stifling if every action you take in life has to be fact checked with a subjective every changing cultural rule book anyway. People only make rules because outgoing, adventurous, creative people did something out of the box, and eventually after all of the controversy faded away, people realize he/she had a point.

Instead, this is how I choose to live my life, and how I choose to create. I seek to live with purpose. That purpose is to love and serve others. However I go about doing that, as long as that’s at the center of ‘why’ I’m doing things, then everything else… doesn’t matter.

P.S. Just FYI, I looked it up and the 3 dot thing is called an ellipsis.