What they don’t tell you is that you will edit and revise yourself with efficient brutality.
You will shatter yourself on the floor until you crumble in shards of ceramic, like a pink piggy bank which you hope conceals your golden ticket.
You will pilfer the dirt for small pieces of what you once called a person, and arrange them in a more flattering mosaic on the cement.
You will assume that the art is better for being broken, and that revision is like the circle of life: unscrupulous and unavoidable, and that a Frankenstein of a portrait is more attractive than a breathing, beating, whole one.
They don’t tell you how you will scavenge. They don’t tell you how you will core yourself like a peach, fingers finding purchase in your own identity and bruising as they tunnel inward. There must be something worth something in there! You will be the vulture picking through your own innards, hunting for the heart.
Real people not admissible! They tell you in fine print. No mushy soft parts that don’t hold up to probing. No inconvenient inner core to bite around. What is left? You ask. And they don’t tell you.