Read this when you aren't being creative anymore.
When is the last time you made something? Really made something? When is the last time you felt paint on your hands or smeared ink over a line of words pulled from your heart?
I’m beginning to notice that for a lot of us, it’s been too long.
We get lost in our everyday life and duties. Our attention gets pulled in a million different directions. We forget how important expression is. We ignore the feeling of bursting at the seams.
We forget to imagine. We forget to create.
And yet, the thing that separates us as humans from the rest of the animal world is our need to create. To innovate. To build, destroy, and build again.
So if you ask me, to ignore our need to create is to avoid our very humanity.
Whether you believe yourself to be creative or not, let me tell you that you are.
From the earliest moments of finger painting to the worlds you created in your mind when you’d spend hours “playing pretend.”
You were born to create. Somewhere along the way someone told you that dealing with the realities of the world were more important. They told you that when art class was optional and science was not. They told you that when they used the words “starving artist.” They told you that when they told you to go to college and get a “real” job. No one ever told you your art was important. No one ever told you the world needed it.
How could you ever make the time to paint when you had bills to pay? How will you find the time to create a song when the dishes need doing? When would you ever manage to make a video when you barely have time to take a lunch?
And why?
Well let me tell you that this is all we’ve got. The past isn’t a thing anymore. It’s not malleable. It’s unchanging. It only exists in your memory. The future isn’t guaranteed. It doesn’t exist yet. For all we know, it might never come.
If you feel like making something, make it.
Otherwise, what is the point of all this? You’re a walking tornado of emotion and your natural instinct is to express it.
Life is about experience. It’s about what you’re experiencing at this very moment. About all the moments that have brought you joy. It’s about the next moment and what you’ll do with it.
What will you experience with it?
Release all the pressure that’s been building up and just MAKE something.
Be bad at it, and make it anyway. Do it more. Do it daily. Get better. Show no one, show everyone, I don’t care. Do it for yourself. Unplug from social media. Turn off the TV. Make something.
Pick something up and paint it. Make it new. Feel proud of yourself for doing that.
Write a poem on a napkin. Tuck it in a journal. Or take a picture of it and post it.
Close all the doors and windows and sing at the top of your lungs. Or open the windows. Take a guitar to the park and just play. Or just play in your room. Learn to play the piano. Learn to do something, anything.
Fill a journal with markers you haven’t used since high school. Make a collage from old magazines. Use all the stickers you’ve been “saving” - saving for what?
You have a heart and soul that ache to create. Why do you smother the ache?
Don’t think about it. Just do something. Just make something. Then make something else. Stop overthinking it. You’ll never get better at something by overthinking about it. You’ll only get better by doing it. And anyway, who cares. Who decides what’s good?
Who cares if it’s good. That’s not really the point is it?
The point is experience remember?
And before you start to question what the best use of your time is or what your grand purpose is, I’m going to tell you something you don’t want to hear:
It doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter what your purpose is or what the passion of your life will be. You don’t know right now. And if you do, somewhere deep down, you aren’t aware of it yet.
If you were, you wouldn’t have to sit for hours filled with anxiousness trying to figure it out. You’d just know.
So how do you figure it out then? How do you learn what those things are?
By doing. By trying. By failing. But getting so freaking close and then going back out like the tide. Be feeling disappointed. Then by settling into something new, or back into something you’d forgotten about. By succeeding, then failing, then succeeding again.
I know you’re thinking it’s easier said than done, but the fact is, the action of actually doing things isn’t the hardest part by far. The hardest part is wrestling with the mental blocks that try to protect you from uncomfortable feelings. Get past your fear of trying something, learn that it isn’t so bad, and the next time you are going to try something, it will be just a little easier. Keep doing that and over time, the fear will be a much smaller mountain to climb.
You need to experience more discomfort in order to learn that the actual doing part really isn’t so bad at all.
And surprisingly, neither is a little bit of risk. Or feeling a bit embarrassed by our own vulnerability. In fact, these things are almost never as bad as worrying about them was.
Failure isn’t even a bad thing - it’s a necessary thing. If you don’t risk failing a little, you’re not going to learn through experience. You’re going to stay exactly where you’re at in this very moment: stifled, anxious, and unfulfilled. Fail more to learn more. Fail more to succeed more.
With that in mind, follow an impulse. Try something that intrigued you, but you never made time for. Finish a project you were into, but never finished. Whatever you feel the need to make, lean into that feeling instead of resisting it.
Stop talking yourself out of trying things. Start asking yourself “why not?”
If it’s in your human nature to create, then why not? If the point of your life is to experience things and express the emotions you’re feeling, then why not? If discomfort really isn’t so bad once you get past the mental block, then why not? If failure - or being bad at something - is actually a necessary means to an end, then why the hell not?
The only thing holding you back, is you.
Let go, and just make something.