I teach, which means I do a lot of learning all day. I also have a podcast about Golden Girls: http://goldengabs.podbean.com/

May 6, 2016

Am I Being A Good Millennial Now?

Content seems to be a big buzzword right now among up-and-coming 20-and 30-somethings. Social media encourages us to be both content creators and content consumers. The first graders I teach will grow up drowning in content; they’ll have content coming out their ears! It’s a cornucopia of accessible creation, and everyone can have a voice! My friends, we have reached The FUTURE!

And so along the way, natives to the age of content will have to learn how to sift through it to find the really good content, the reputable stuff . There’s too much content to read all of it, so don’t even bother creating any unless it’s totally shareable (look at all the great 21st century vocabulary I’m using!).

Therein lies the source of my creative paralysis.

In teacher school, you spend a lot of credit hours talking about theorists like Maslow, who suggested that we all have a drive to work toward self-actualization. Look, there it is sitting all shiny at the top of his diagram.

Basically, being able to work on self-actualization is being able to do the things that help you grow as a person: personal challenges, self-improvement, creativity, etc, but you have to work on the lower levels of the pyramid before you can get there.

Notice how the step below self-actualization is esteem? (I don’t know why he hyphenated self-actualization but didn’t bother to go ahead and call it self-esteem too, #teacherthoughts, but) I THINK MR. MASLOW WAS ON TO SOMETHING HERE.

Five paragraphs in, we have reached my thesis statement: it sure is kinda scary to be creative when all of the internet is rubbing its sweaty palms together, fingers ready at the keyboard to judge everything you create. Furthermore, this is a bummer.

I’m sure I’m not alone in engaging in this kind of self-talk: “I would love to write something, BUUUUT….

…I don’t have any good ideas.”
…whenever I do have a good idea, it ends up sounding stupid later.”
…no one will read it anyway.”
…the people who do read it will tear it apart.”
…I don’t have time.” ←biggest excuse in history; time is an illusion. #staywoke
…I’m already working on enough important things all day.”
…I don’t have the skills.”
…there are a ton of talented creators out there, and my creations wouldn’t stand up to that.”

Are you hearing how this sounds?? My inner monologue sounds like the verbally abusive relationship American sex ed classes failed to warn us all about! I recently heard someone give the sage advice, “Don’t engage in self-talk that you wouldn’t say to a friend.”

Guess who won the gold medal for not following that advice? Shoot, I’m doing it again.

I’ve always enjoyed writing. When I was eleven, I could sit down with MS Word 2002 and spend hours writing a scene about an eleven-year-old protagonist being whisked away by magical creatures to a fantastical land of beauty and adventure. I’d come away from the keyboard feeling so satisfied to have delved into my imagination for awhile, critics be damned (I enjoyed overusing adjectives, okay?).

Then the almighty Five Paragraph Essay was introduced. By college, there were Creative Writing Majors, and writing for Everyone Else became a purely functional endeavor. I plunged into developing a career, and alongside my other adolescent hobbies, creative writing dissolved from my life.

I spent the last few years brazenly forging for myself an awesome life: I graduated, got married, and landed a sweet job that actually uses my degree. I’m super happy about my situation, which is something that maybe not everyone my age can say.

And the whole time, I’ve missed having creative hobbies. I’ve felt a nagging desire to contribute something to the world outside of my work. But I’ve been too crippled by fearful self-talk to do anything about it. My eleven-year-old imagination is dusty from misuse and neglected amidst all of the distracting content on social media, and that’s a shame.

So today, as I find myself plagued with laryngitis and faced with all of these thoughts in the gap where work usually takes up brain space, I pledge to change that. I pledge to pay more attention to my thoughts so that I can write them down occasionally for the fun of it, critics be damned. And critics be also listened to, because self-improvement is part of this whole step. Critics be used as a vessel for building self-esteem. High five, Maslow.

I pledge to turn CONtent into an avenue for focusing on feeling conTENT again. See what I did there? Am I being a good millennial now?

Special thanks to rileyneffwarner for taking an inspiring first step, to my husband for making time to do judo when you’re exhausted, and to my other friends who fearlessly do your hobbies.