If you love art it becomes easy to see in it a panacea. Art is many things, but it is not everything. Art can remind you of better times, but can’t bring them back. Art can make you fall in love, but it can’t love you. Art can inspire you, but it can’t create for you.
It cannot fix you. It cannot fulfill you. It cannot free you. Art can only help you see the ways in which you might be broken, might be wanting, might be trapped.
It should be obvious, but when you’re hungry and you’re hurting it isn’t. When all you remember is the good old days and how much fun the games were back then, you reach for the games you remember even though the spirit of that time has fled them. When all you feel is alone, you reach out for whatever company you can get, however fictional, however distant, and even if you’re a stranger to them they’re a friend to you, even if they’re a ghost story you tell yourself at night to believe that there’s something out there, they’re real to you.
It’s so easy to believe in this placebo.
If it’s all you have, it might help. You might find some shadow of the comfort you want. But, like with all placebos, there’s a danger it might supplant the real medicine, cause you to never find a doctor to look at the rot in you, expose it to light, lance it.
This isn’t all there is. There’s more.
I can’t tell you what to look for, though. There’s an unlimited spectrum of lives to lead, ambitions to hunger for, realizations to face, and each of them belongs to someone else. My life won’t fit you. Your life won’t fit me. We can’t trade. We can only custom fit ourselves as best as we can, blind tailors with numb fingers, trying to remember, from long ago, just what shape we were born to take.