Artistic legitimacy is born out of suffering. How often do we hear this cultural message? How often do we see stories, videos, and tales romanticizing trauma, addiction, and mental health struggles and portraying them as sources of creativity? We don’t even realize how dangerous this rhetoric is because it’s so commonplace. And, often remaining unaware, we re-transmit it to others. Believing that trauma fuels creativity and brings forth our best talents reflects a gross misunderstanding of trauma, most often – as a consequence of having never really experienced it. This belief correlates with a privileged life experience in which trauma is misconceptualized and trivialized as frustration, stress, and disappointment. Talking about “spiritual enlightenment” in the context of trauma becomes a form of spiritual bypass. A way to avoid critical awareness. A way to deny structural barriers and systemic oppression that lead to the enormous waste of creative talent around the world. A way to never practice empathy towards people who never had the same opportunities, freedoms, and rights as you’ve had for no fault of their own. Living my entire life under multiple, intersecting layers of trauma, and being clear about my story throughout the networking efforts for my book, I cannot tell you how many times I heard this BS rhetoric about my trauma being “the source of my amazing creative talent” – invariably from the mouths of upper-middle-class, predominantly white Americans. Every time, they employed this rhetoric to make themselves comfortable with denying me help and support that they had the power to extend through their privilege – because, whether I liked it or not, my story effectively exposed the unearned nature of their privilege and called bullshit on the fairy tale of meritocracy, which they had their self-worth entirely built upon.

Join me in this conversation to explore how creativity, vulnerability, and trauma are contextually related. In this video, I share my journey as an artist coming from a place of intersectional disadvantage, which is not very obvious because of my Whiteness, masculinity, cisness, and a university degree. For the majority of my life, my talent has been stifled by multiple layers of trauma. My creativity has been handicapped by multiple layers of oppression. At the same time, I got effectively brainwashed – by the culture, by the church, and, most recently, by privileged American people – into the belief that my trauma happens for some good reason and in fact nourishes my creativity. One of the most important messages I want to leave to the world is that that is a toxic, barefaced lie. The only reason behind that rhetoric was for people in my journey to keep their power and privilege to themselves and deny me the opportunity they could share. The same dynamic is clearly observable in the larger culture. Comfort gets chosen over truth, and bullshit gets employed as a nice, bleached-smile way to keep oppressing those already at huge disadvantage.

I don’t have tons of money for advertising budgets and consequently don’t get millions of views and followers – but if you followed my journey from the beginning and saw my content unfold over the years, you know that it’s not because I ever lacked talent or saved effort, but because effective promotion on social media these days mostly depends on privilege (and people who have it ferociously deny it).

What I do have, though, is a heavy heart. It's heavy because it's full of truth.

And since creativity is the love of my life – the one that oppression has for years blocked me from being with – I have to tell the truth about Her. I have to say that trauma is Her abuser, not Her loving partner or parent. I have to call BS on creative martyrdom and the arguments of privileged people who romanticize trauma and mental health issues. I have to expose how this rhetoric normalizes systemic injustice and the enormous waste of creative talent globally. I’m clear about this: as artists, our job is not to be bullshit-tellers. Our job is to be truth-tellers. Yes, even our truth makes the world uncomfortable. In fact, that’s where our art can make the biggest and the most needed difference.

The referenced story of Hollywood talent agent: https://jorgeoros.com/metoo