Creativity is hard. Writing is how I make sense of everything. It makes me feel purposeful and good; good in the way sleep makes you feel; it grounds me in otherwise frightening and uncertain situations.
I tend to write more when I’m sad. It’s not something I do exclusively, but it’s something that I've noticed. It’s difficult to move throughout life without our poison’s influence. Not just with the consumption of creative things, but just in the continuous engagement in the process of creation. It’s something that comes innately while at the same time is a little impossible. What makes writing hard? The requirement of vulnerability, for one. The act of creation is rife with uncertainty and holds doubts at every turn. Writing, especially being such a solitary activity, makes it incredibly easy to find yourself in self-propelled thought spirals based around your supposed flaws, without anyone there to argue to the contrary.
Hayao Miyazaki said it himself that he can feel the limits of his ability every day. He was talking about getting older, but I think that’s something a lot of us have experienced personally. I can feel myself straining against the limit of my ability as though it were a brick wall and my true potential—whatever that is—is some amorphous shape on the other side that I can’t quite reach. When you make something, it’s hard to feel as though you are not that thing. I’m aware that statement won’t quite make sense if you haven’t experienced it. When I go through moments of despair about what I make, it feels like I’m despairing about myself.
The ideal job allegedly lies in the intersection of opportunity, talent, and passion, or whatever the faux motivational capitalist aphorisms are these days. It’s a bit upsetting to think about the monetization of something that was once rooted in the innocent pursuit of expression. Being creative is hard; being creative on demand is even harder. Making things is like deciding to spend your life playing a rigged demented slot machine except instead of quarters you’re gambling everything that’s ever made you feel something. So is there a point? To any of it? If I can stop being a pessimist for two seconds, I would tell you that I do think that there’s merit to the line of thought that acknowledges value and novelty of individual experience. No one person in this world has the exact same collection of experiences as you, which means that no one person would make the exact same connections as you. In a broader sense, this means that your work has worth or—at the very least—is novel just by virtue of its birth in the mind of you: specifically, one of the chances and abstracts that make up humanity.
I also have a notion that that specific discomfort will ease as I get older. I think I’ll feel more content when I believe in what I’ve made as a product of my experience, practice, and work rather than the fruit of some so-called innate ability. I hate unearned confidence. But I often take too wide of a step in the other direction to avoid disappointment or embarrassment I guess, which isn’t any better mind you. There’s something called the Dunning-Kruger effect which comes into play here. A lot of the time I end up with a really negatively skewed image of work. I still struggle to notice the value in it. Half the time, I don’t even know why I write the things I do; it’s just what I do to express myself.
Some people (whom my parents tend to interact with) have been making comments on what I have chosen to pursue in college. I think it’s really petty. I understand they tend to attach value to some “valuable” majors and disregard “useless” majors. I’m not even sure what I want to do yet, but if I choose to dedicate hours of work to something, I’d rather it be towards something I’m passionate about. And no one can devalue that. There are countless job opportunities for all sorts of majors who want to go into tech, if that’s what they’re concerned about. For example, Phil Crippen, CEO of John Adams IT, said that "the industry is always in need of a deeper level of 'humanization' so that stronger connections can be formed between companies and customers”. "The [humanities graduates] provide a perspective that the average technology specialist probably doesn't have." Robert Soares, the founder of Provided, noted that “ideally, you want to be able to pull ideas and approaches from one field into another” and “ any degree can do well in technology. It's about bringing what's unique from your experience and applying it to your new field." Take what you want from this.
In prospect, how can I measure or reaffirm the importance or necessity of what I do in a way that is healthy? What—aside from the inescapable personal pull I feel towards it—is supposed to motivate me enough to keep me shoving the rock (the absurd dilemma) higher and higher? There is no greater feeling than when someone truly understands you. I have yet to meet someone who does. To be completely honest, I don’t think it’s ever possible. As I said, nobody has undergone the same experiences as you, so they have no way of truly ever relating to you. Generally, I place the opinions of my peers in incredibly high regard. Sometimes everything I make just feels like an elaborate scheme to get the people close to me to tell me “good job”. I truly have zero desire for any sort of fame or public adoration as a symbol of approval. But I also want to make something important. But I don’t know what makes things important. I’m struggling to figure it out. I also don’t know why I want to make something important if I don’t even know what it is. Is it the number of people reached? Is it the strength of the impact on those people? Is it how much it inspired people or the subsequent importance of the world? I think things are important if they change people and not just entertain them. Or is pure entertainment just as important in the midst of all this?
Does a work’s value exist outside of how people perceive it? I know it’s impossible to quantify but the most important work is anything that made even one person not want to die. Do you think it matters? Do you think this matters? Am I trying too hard enough? Am I trying enough?
A lot of this fear comes from uncertainty and a lack of control. A worry, at least for me, about being misunderstood somehow. It’s hard to communicate our thoughts into language. Although it’s not exactly transcendentally useful advice, it does help to focus on the work itself instead of the unknowns.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of deliberately making sure in every element’s inclusion and every word’s inclusion that there was an active decision that occurred. This is very me specific but what I write tends to ask a lot of questions that reflect me as a person. I wonder things all day long in trains of thought which are concluded only by a spirited return to the beginning to ride them all over again. I like to end with at least a direction or idea, if not an answer, of how to proceed. When I think about all the things that have resonated with me like my favorite stories or my favorite poems, I definitely have ideas or arcs that I tend towards. There’s no real defining line though. The things that I love have come to me purely through serendipity either because they caught me in the right mood or at the right time in my life. I can only assume that if someone is to love what I do, and therefore me, it will be a similar situation where I’ll just have caught them at the right time.
At this point, I think I’ve maybe spent too much time concerned with wanting to prove something. It’s only recently sunk in that I’m not writing to try and convince people who don’t like what I do. I’m writing for the people who would have liked it anyway. I just want to make someone feel something. Is there maybe something selfish about it? Probably. Of course creativity is not an entirely selfless endeavor but I also don’t think it’s selfish to want to be the one to give people those defining experiences or comfort or unexpected moments of understanding that you’ve had. I think it just speaks to our desire to connect. I want to return or match or expand on what I feel the world has given to me in entropy. It’s scary sharing any acts to the claustrophobia of the human experience. It’s scary to be known; to let things be seen. But the ability to create is an evolutionary birthright that it’s impossible to not be worthy of and really short-sighted to waste. And when you consider what it actually means to be here at all, thoughts of self-doubt tend to dissipate.
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