A friend, who I thought knew what she was doing, scared me one day. She’d grabbed my wrist in alarm when I told her that I posted some of my writing online for free. She was a working artist and spoke with authority:
“Never post anything for free. It’s finite. You have to get paid.”
Paid? I love getting paid. Putting boundaries around my skills—believing in the value of them—is crucial.
But, having little immunity to others’ panic, I fell into the trap of her other words, into the idea that my ideas were finite.
What a cruel lie to tell oneself.
The lie breeds preciousness for our work—fertile ground for perfectionism.
“If you sat down to execute The One Great Idea you would ever have… Would you even start? Would you ever finish?”
When I was fifteen, I doodled everywhere. In the margins of every notebook. In sketchbook after sketchbook. On my hand. On my desk. On any blank space I could find.
Now a blank page haunts me.
The ink in my pen will either become a stain or a piece of art and I’m so avoidant of the stain that I will not attempt the art. I have to swallow emotions I don’t even understand when I approach a blank page. I have to, by brute force, make contact with the paper.
Drawing, and any playfulness or release that once came with it, is gone. The atrophied muscle, difficult to restrengthen. It affects my writing too. It affects all things.
In high school, I poured my soul into slapdash poems to keep myself sane. I put scissors to my favorite tees just to see what would happen. I wrote stories that I never felt the pressure to finish. I experimented endlessly and I felt free.
Now I struggle to make the first cut into a new piece of fabric. My ideas gather dust, rolled up in pristine yardage, untransformed.
Ten empty journals, donated to the thrift store.
And all because I bought into the lie that I would run out of ideas. That I had to treat every single one as the one that would change my life. That I had to hoard them and wait for the perfect moment in my evolution to make them real.
This lie shares space with the falsehood that we must perfectly fix ourselves before we are deserving of the love of someone else. It ignores that we are all a work in progress…
And so is our art.
“The ink in my pen will either become a stain or a piece of art and I’m so avoidant of the stain that I will not attempt the art.”
Progress stalls the moment we stop attempting things.
If fear is the strongest emotion you feel when presented with creative opportunity—a blank canvas, a hot mic, an empty dance floor—then you’re already in deep. Getting back to a sense of “play” will, paradoxically, require “work.” I know, because I’m in the midst of that work now and my teeth clench every time I put a mark on a fresh page.
But start by rejecting the idea that your well of creativity can ever dry up. Or that you have to put every drop of it toward something “productive” or “perfect” or “lucrative.” Sometimes you’ll just need to express yourself. Sometimes your art will be a way to scream into the void and feel better after. These are as necessary and valid as any other way to “spend” your creativity.
If you sat down to execute The One Great Idea you would ever have… Would you even start? Would you ever finish?
It takes trust, bordering on faith, to realize we’ve got more than The One Great Idea in us. But we do.