Insecure Creatives, Gather!

words guiding me this week

Hi lovely people,

I’ve missed you so. This week I’m preparing myself to return to TikTok and I am terrified! I am so often terrified! So I thought I’d share the words guiding me creatively. These are a few of many words I lean on internally very often in order to be able to create and share my work with you and so many other people. My friends often come to me seeking advice on how to overcome creative resistance and complete or share their work. I battle with this daily and so I wanted to share some of the many words I come back to for guidance. I want to be clear I am speaking to those of you who have already decided you want to start, complete, or share a creative work or project but are experiencing resistance, fear, and insecurity in the process. I am not trying to inspire people to create more or to hustle more or anything like that. So this is for the insecure creatives in the room, gather round! Maybe you’re scared to even call yourself a creative (you are! we all are!) but you feel a force within you to create that is begging to be acknowledged. I see you, you see me, we see each other ;)

very often as creative people (which we all are! try fight me!) we avoid our projects by telling ourselves we are not yet ready. We need to read a few more books, or we need to edit a few more times, or maybe we need to work on our speaking voice before we share our voice. Let’s throw this mentality away immediately. We are a future self of one of our younger selves who wanted to know more. We know so much, we hold so many stories and ideas and perspectives within us that could serve the world, ourselves, and each other.

The myth is that one day we will “arrive” in a state of readiness to create or to share our creations. I am here to tell you: You will never be ready until you allow yourself to believe you already are. Paradoxically. Especially in our world, there will always be more to read, more to learn, more to understand than we could ever possibly hope to in one lifetime. We need to realize that our ticket to our creativity is our aliveness! We are alive! We have senses through which to receive the universe, each other, art, everything! And we have an inner world with which to process what we receive! And we have so much to give within ourselves and within our experiences! Our aliveness is our readiness to create. When we silence that aliveness, what are we effectively doing? We call it perfectionism, but what is perfectionism?

What happens on a mass societal level when a bunch of us, especially those of us who are women or femmes, who are Black, who are marginalized, are convinced we are not yet good enough? What are the socio-cultural implications of this silencing? When we know culture moves society and society moves culture, what does it mean to exclude ourselves from this life force of change? “We do the work of the state through our interior lives” Angela Davis says. We do the work of the oppressor through our own perfectionism. And we know that perfectionism is related to both white supremacy and patriarchy and ablism and so many others. In the face of a society that wants to silence us, this means that…

Our creativity — in all its glorious “imperfection” if we actively want to claim this — is part of how we bring a new world into Being, and how we co-create society, and become the World Builders and paradigm shifters we each are. How do we add to the collective? We rebel against the structures that do not serve it, which includes perfectionism. Every surface area of our hearts (Ruha Benjamin used these beautiful words in my podcast episode with her which I literally balled my eyes out right before bc I was like who am I to be doing this I’m so overwhelmed) that we use to connect to each other is an act of rebellion, because so many systems want us divided, separate, and wholly unimaginative.

Whatever you are trying to create, which could be art or a movement or a protest or a methodology or a workshop, if you do not have the perfect plan? Great. That means what you are doing exists outside the bounds of the architecture of our current world; it therefore challenges some of this world’s underlying assumptions or attachments. Maybe your struggle is that you don’t think of yourself as a creative person. That means that in the context of the society that conditioned you, you exist outside the mold of an identity that it serves the status quo to define as inherently limited. There are creative people, and you’re just not one of them! BS. We are all creative. I believe this with my whole being. It is our birthright, it is our way of Being, we could not be otherwise if we tried. Creativity is a force within us, that some of us actively choose to tap into and harness and share outwardly with others if we want to make this offering to the collective. We become even more creative by creating consistently. You are reading this because there is a voice inside you that knows it must be heard, that you must create, that you are a creator. Within this process, we must not be the silencer of our own creations. Let the world do that to us if it must. This is because…

So much of our society is deeply unnatural — is deeply toxic to our ability to exist within it. And shame is a core part of what is so unnatural about our world. How much shame we all carry. If we want to move towards a more natural way of relating and being, we have to acknowledge how unfortunate it is that we are human beings that feel we cannot fully live out our humanity, which is in part our creativity. Like a tree saying, I must not blossom the flowers whose seeds I hold within me, because the onlooker might judge me harshly. We deserve to be our fullest and most expansive selves. Each time one of us chooses to embody that, we light the way for another. This means that if we have poems or songs or stories or videos inside of us, it is most natural for us to express them in the universe somehow, whether it be letting it sit on a page (have you ever seen how powerful it is to just have a scary thought of yours expressed in your journal?) or sharing it with a friend or sharing it online. Knowing that…

We all feel it. That author who moved you so deeply with their book, that artist whose song touches you, that actress who brings you so much joy, that director who brings you to tears. One thing that is guaranteed given the culture we all exist in? They experienced self-doubt at some and possibly all stages of their creative life and process, sometimes debilitatingly.

One of my recent videos on Love is Blind I actually meant to save to drafts because I thought it wasn’t good enough yet. It’s my most viral video on Instagram! I feel shame often, I feel fear often, I feel uncertainty often. I will never be a confident creative, and some days that saddens me because this would all be so much easier if there weren’t so much fear involved. But I know that fear is part of me, and I try to sit with it, but I try not to let it control me. I often fail! But I keep trying. When I am feeling stuck and thinking to myself, I am not sure if I can keep going, I tell myself…

This brings down the scale of our ambitions and roots us in what I feel I and perhaps many of you feel you are here to do: to serve people through the work. The work itself is a channel, a portal to a deeper and more transcendent experience. To help the viewer or listener or reader in some way — feel less alone, feel seen, feel excited, energized, cared for, reflected in terms of how we both see the world. I want to connect. Find your why, it doesn’t have to be this.

Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in our own ego — we want to be great. We don’t want to just write, we want to be great writers. We don’t want to just post a video, we want to go viral. We want lots of followers! Awards! Accolades! But none of this is what it’s about — and if you experience creative fear, it’s important to not make it about these grand ambitions and scale it back to what feels achievable, meaningful, and tangible to you. For me, if I believe this work could speak to or give voice to or move or touch or make laugh or make feel or connect to ONE PERSON, then WHO AM I NOT TO SHARE IT? I am one person. They are my other me. I am their other me. I hit send and I tell myself that:

I tell myself this so as not to get lost in numbers, views, likes, followers. I cannot make what I do about how people react to it, or I would combust into flames. Whether or not the video goes viral, is none of my business. I am the creator, my work is to create, the audience’s work is to receive and judge the work as they will. Anything that distracts my ego from that fact is not my business. I of course love to know that I have touched people. But if I make it all about how they express being touched or how many people express it etc etc, then I start to lose myself. And the one thing I work tirelessly not to do is to lose myself. This is not my business. I did my best to touch people, and I hope they are touched, but now my work is to continue to create, or to rest, or to go have fun, or whatever it is. It’s not that I don’t care about feedback, but I do not want to be beholden to it. I don’t want to say, “I did a good thing today because people liked it!” this gives all my power away. I want to say, I gave my all to this, and I made something I am proud of. And yes I can take feedback to guide me in my next work. Living the paradox, that it’s only in being true to myself that I can deeply serve others, I am able to do both. Ultimately, the goal is to:

I speak about this in my podcast episode and YouTube video on finding your voice. Paint the outer world with your inner world! I tell myself, I’m going to die. That’s a guarantee. So do I want to die with all these ideas known to me alone? Take them with me to the grave? What’s the point, when each was hard-earned by my life experiences, by my aliveness, by my senses and my being? When each could touch someone in a way I can’t even begin to understand or predict? There is no point in me dying with my ideas. This doesn’t have to be true for you — I don’t believe art is only meaningful if shared. Obviously I carry some bias as my work is very public but I don’t think this is a higher form of working, it is just what I’ve chosen to do. I know that I do feel this need to share my voice for this reason; that I don’t want to die with it. Because it takes so many people, so many consciousnesses, to move culture, to help millions of others usher in a new world, so…

Not you alone, but us together. Why not your ideas? Why not your consciousness? Why not your creativity? What is that different between you and the person who moved you so? Isn’t it you were moved because you are in some fundamental way so similar to them? Because you felt so seen by their words, by their art? Because it resonated in some deep part of your belly? Is it not our shared consciousness that makes any of this possible? So why not you, why not me, why not us? And when we are rooted in something bigger than us, in serving the collective or in serving our inner child which is necessarily part of the collective, then we can remove ourselves from the pressure of the outcome, and remember that…

I know it feels like the world hangs on this project. But we have to maintain perspective and recognize that it is “both the most important thing ever and not important at all” in the words of Rick Rubin. Live in the paradox.

And finally, can we find some pleasure in this process?! Is that not part of why we do it? I will leave you with an invitation:

I am very fascinated by the Erotic. I’ve shared the Audre Lorde essay before, The Uses of the Erotic. In it she asks us to consider what if the Erotic was a standard by which we lived all of our lives. That certainly includes creativity. Isn’t inspiration a form of being turned on by life, by art, by an idea? There is a saying: Don’t follow your passion, follow your curiosity. Perhaps follow the intersection.

On Saturday I was thinking to myself, I need to return to Substack on Monday — What am I going to create? And I meditated for 1 hour. I set a timer on my phone for an hour. And I stared at the wall, and I sat with myself. We are always looking for ideas outside of ourselves. It’s important to turn inwards. And I thought, what are the words that I am leaning on this week as I try (after many fails) to return to posting on TikTok after an extended break? Couldn’t these same words help other people? I am proud of myself because I saw an idea to completion, and this is more often not the case. I hope this touches jut one person. It turned me on to try.

I love you. I appreciate you. I see you.