The bridge between creativity and everyday life on prolific work
I’m currently on this crazy journey of daily writing, drawing and composing while maintaining my life as a developer. It is not easy to work on this type of routine, especially when you start everything at the same time. All of the resources I’ve read stated that it is much better to form a small habit and let it grow to create other habits. I even wrote about it already. Unfortunately, I feel like I don’t have the time to wait for one habit to grow before I move on to the next type of project. There’s a sense of emergency to change the current state of my life as of today. So I decided to start all of these new habits at the same time.
However, there’s a huge problem with my approach and it became visible in less than a week doing it. It takes time to develop a personal identity on the creations. In other words, it takes time to build momentum. For example, I would rewrite my pieces of text two or three times before publishing, sometimes even discarding the first draft. This ruins my schedule because something expected to take one hour a day was now taking two hours. I would do that simply because of a mental barrier that struggles to associate myself with that specific writing I’m creating. This is more alarming with the writing part because visual arts and music are quite subjective. Writing is not subjective, unless I’m doing a specific fictional work, which I’m not. With drawing and music, I just let my mind flow. I might end up with something I’m not fond of, but it is not a problem to me, I just move on and make sure the next drawing or composition is a bit better than the previous. Writing however represents a constant statement from my logical self, and that creates a barrier. I began to wonder if I was going to fail for thinking I do not have enough interesting material to write about or if I’m simply going to keep dissatisfied with what I’m writing.
And that’s where I need to stop thinking about that.
I created Ideas as Opiates based on writings I have yet to publish about how my favorite creators used their mediums to truly express themselves. Writing should be a relief, not a burden to worry about what others are thinking.
“What if someone links something I’ve written in the past saying I contradicted myself?”
“What if someone points out a terrible mistake?”
“What if I can’t sustain all the ideas I’m commenting in general?”
“What if I looked back and found what I wrote to be stupid overall?”
The answer to all of these questions is: it really doesn’t matter.
Many of my creators developed work which they are not proud anymore. That is not a problem, that is a sign of evolution. They made their statement, and now they’re on to a new statement.
Opiates are a mean to help ease the pain. My favorite poet wrote a huge poem about it. It took me forever to understand what he was talking about. But the subject of easing the pain through creation makes ourselves more susceptible to understand and be understood by others in a deeper sense. I’m not saying that the writings should have the same effect as the drug. I just needed to feel the necessity of actually writing, instead of solely being afraid and overwhelmed. Just like my favorite poet.
The topic of easing the pain got twisted when I simply decided to start doing this type of project. I was afraid it would become a monologue and I wasn’t really going to add anything or connect to other people’s lives except for letting go what was on my mind at that moment. So I came up with a great way of actually writing something more helpful in order to find balance between adding value and finding relief: write to my future self.
Writing for my future self will make it easier to maintain my sanity. I won’t worry as much and probably will write the best things I can write in the mean time. I just need to know that I’m writing something that will make me interested to read again by tomorrow. Evolution is natural when we are our worst critics. It is time to actually become a prolific creator.
