creation is
creation is:
thinking. overthinking. worrying about overthinking. trying to swap it for under-thinking. worrying that neither is right and you’ll be aiming for you-don’t-know-what while trying to make what you’re making.
looking at what you have and worrying that no matter how you cut it, shape it, colour it, frame it, order it or talk about it, that the people watching and deciding will just not see what is so clear to you. feelings and ways that are near-impossible for another to see and you’re trying to build them a telescope like yours. but a telescope that’s also a kaleidoscope. because you feel that might help. seeing what is so straight to you might mean their vision being warped.
trying to retain the truth that something is valid and good and well-worked if it means something to you; despite others not always giving love or perfect understanding making it all feel like such a waste. wasn’t telling them something in an interesting way the point? their thoughts, their feelings having something else to partner with? but you can’t help policing the way they step, or if they don’t dance at all.
panicking when your ideas/plans are taking a while to come together because will you ever get it down and if you do it would be so forced from worrying about it for so long why is it so difficult?
panicking when you get ideas/plans straight away because that means they came pure/un-twisted from your mind really easily so they’re probably an idea that’s really true and natural to you BUT no you can’t just go with that, can you? the first words you write, the first photos you find, what your mind said the moment the work came into being, before any pressure and your brain was excitedly whispering instead of screaming yet? those? i mean you have to agonise and you have to WORK because you’re worthless if you don’t work but in this case all that work might spoil the nature of your original idea but you can’t not work i mean surely you can’t just make something with this much EASE and just BELIEVE IN YOURSELF and get it done faster than usual because that just feels wrong the lack of agony might catch up with you somehow because it has to be difficult???
wondering if the reason that whatever you’re making never seems good enough is not because of this or that decision or medium or approach, but because your entire central thought wasn’t good enough. the more important that centre is (like if it’s based on a trauma of yours, or a transformation), the more crushing this can seem. what is the world just doesn’t care about this thing that changed mine, no matter how i show it to them?
all of these thoughts ringing like a dinner bell to some impossible banquet of failure all the time.
ringing so loud that you pick apart everything you’ve done, are about to do, or might do like a brain surgery. as though each individual sentence, photo, brush stroke, whatever it is — is what the piece hinges on to be perfect.
and then once they’re perfect, or hysterically close enough; then you start wondering if they should be a different kind of perfect. another weight, another way, rearranging the punches to the gut, or perhaps not having them.
types of self-doubt (such as the above) that become so impossibly complicated and micro-perfectionistic and somehow comparative to every art piece that has ever been; that you didn’t know they were possible until they happened.
hating yourself for worrying that everything you make that has to be as good as you can make it; wishing for ease, but then as good as you can make it isn’t as good as the world has ever seen; so that’s not good enough either.
wondering why, why, why thinking was ever invented because you hate it but then remember it can do so much good and try and stay on that good side and feel even more lost.
floating in a strange state of having all these thoughts that seem so awful and paralysing and driving you to madness but having to keep creating almost without knowing what you’re actually doing and just hoping it will all turn out alright because you care you are putting in effort and despite everything these thoughts tell you, people who care with their hearts and make effort with their hands are so good.
wondering how something you adore and live for and literally want to spend your life doing can drag you into such a labyrinth of negativity and over-thought where you know if you get too lost for too long the consequences are genuinely dire and you will have to watch yourself slip away again.
knowing that only that slipping away is the bad thing; slipping away from wanting to live — all that other floating you do of “i might be going into a spiral and i don’t know if this is good enough and i never feel the sureness of having something to grab but i know i’m here because of love and because i want to share things like joy and beauty with other humans so at least this black hole has stars around it and sometimes when you spin or fall without a hold you make that scream of laughter”
creation is:
the only thing that lets you see how beautiful anything can be.
