You don’t have to be original

Artwork by Florian Nicolle

With every creative endeavor comes the initial harangue of our inner critic:

‘This idea has already been taken.’

‘How can I even compete with the works of giants?’

‘I’m not good enough.’

‘I am unoriginal.’

Usually, the critic wins and I shrink back into the agonizing comforts of passivity. On the rare occasion that I win, I feel like a fraud. My ‘intellect’ and ‘creativity’, superficial. My thoughts, creations — heck, my entire personality — nothing more than a collage of stolen influences. It was only a matter of time before someone found out.

Let’s dissect this mindset.

The human compulsion to expand the realms of possibility has existed since the dawn of time. This alone is beautiful. However, the fear of unoriginality — or Vemödalen, as John Koenig calls it in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — coupled with notions of ‘intellectual property’, torments the creative ego like no other. For if, in the end, we find ourselves without a verse to contribute to the ‘powerful play’, we would become indistinguishable from the 7 billion others clawing for scraps of frontier.

But perhaps there is some solace to be found in the inevitable reality of our sameness. Perhaps it is not about differentiation (which always involves some form of self-comparison) but identifying relationships, connections and nuances.

True novelty, then, does not come from within but without; the cross-pollination of ideas. After all, it is through curating these seemingly unrelated fragments of truth that we ultimately realize our truth.

In an emboldening TED talk, Kirby Ferguson urges his audience to embrace the remix:

‘We are not self-made, but dependent on one another. Admitting this to ourselves is not an embrace of mediocrity and derivativeness — it’s liberation from our misconceptions, and an incentive to not expect so much from ourselves and to simply begin.’

So steal, dear reader. Steal with reckless abandon and select only those which resonate with you profoundly. But don’t try conceal this thievery out of indignity or shame — there is nothing to be ashamed of. Give credit, absolutely, but actively resist the self-detriment and misguided fear which Vemödalen imposes.

Only then will your collage be ‘original’.