Showing Up

I've written several possible blog posts for this week, but none of them have felt quite right.

I could talk about brands and having your own creative voice. Or how to stay motivated to create during a creation challenge. How to know if you need to change course in your creativity or creative process.

I could write about how to stay motivated and creative through challenging life circumstances, how to generate ideas on a daily basis, or how to fall in love with your work. I could talk about names and identity, about my past, or about the idea of community, connection, and belonging.

I could write about evaluating your work, not allowing a perfectionistic fear of failure to prevent you from improving, and about practicing what you'd like to see grow. Embracing multiple forms of creativity. Or directions my work could go.

But my thoughts are jumbled.

It isn't coming out right. I ramble more than I articulate. And I struggle with that. I would like to be an articulate person, yet so much of the time I feel I'm not. Maybe it's perfectionism, maybe it's self-awareness, that's hard to say. It's hard to know the difference.

I think the important thing is, whether we're clear on our voice or not, that we speak.

It's often in the speaking, the writing, and the processing with others that fuzzy things become clear.

So I might write about all those topics someday. (Let me know which ones you'd prefer to hear.) But maybe, for today, the important thing is just to show up. Even when it makes no sense and the meaning's still a bit unclear.

Art can be healing. Creativity freeing. It's in the process of refining that we discover who we are.

So keep chipping away at it. Keep creating. Keep writing. Keep connecting with others who will be a mirror and help you see the value in your work.

You don't have to believe in yourself. That often clouds our ability to see clearly anyway. You just have to show up.