Whatever You Think You Know About Yourself, You’re Wrong

The Second Rule of Artist’s Journey is this:

If you think you know who you are, you’re wrong.

Hunter S. Thompson’s ambition was to write like Scott Fitzgerald. He copied the whole of The Great Gatsby, trying to teach himself to compose sentences that flowed with the effortless grace of those penned by his hero. How surprised must the avatar of gonzo journalism have been to find his true voice, not in This Side of Paradise but in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Generation of Swine?

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are almost always wrong. That’s their nature. The purpose of these self-conceived narratives is to keep us comfortably unconscious. We tell ourselves these stories so we can avoid the pain of diving deep, to the real story underneath.

The artist’s journey is the dive through the faux story to the true one.

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