Becoming the Creator your work needs
A chicken/egg situation
Good morning!
I know, I don’t usually catch up with you on Monday mornings, but since I skipped Friday’s micropod I thought I’d sneak in a quick word. I hope you had a great weekend.
I got the dining nook together — feeling super cozy after the honeycomb-colored walls. I glimpsed a family of deer in the woods, not three yards from the path I was on. Best of all, I got some writing done. I’m starting this week (scheduling this post for tomorrow morning) with just over 21,000 words. It feels wonderful! I also feel like I have a leg to stand on discussing some things about it — not that you need to justify your work to anyone, simply a personal vulnerability — so I’ll shoot for that in the next update.
I think I had intended to discuss becoming the creator your work needs last Friday, so I’ll try to describe what I mean for today.
I was listening to a YouTube video essay (I forget the channel/creator but will update this if I can track it down) and it discussed the topic. Me being me, my mind started to wander.
I don’t think enough people realize, in this era of ever-present content creation (said typing a Substack newsletter, irony not lost), that the act of creation is a truly transformative process. You’re enacting your will to form something out of the sheer force of your mind. You’re making your desires manifest. I don’t think I’m the only one of the opinion that it’s really special; I just think the repetition of small, frequent creations we’re more familiar with in a first-world contemporary sense (no shade to TikTok) makes us numb to the joy.
This is all to say, keep going. Writing will change you, drawing will change you. Making anything: music, videos, physical objects (zines, bookshelves, garages, gardens). There will be times when you won’t be ‘making’. But in a world like ours, I think I just wanted to remind myself and anyone reading this that it’s okay. It’s okay to break with it and maybe return to the concept. It’s okay to give up and find the will and start again.
Because we don’t have a lot of reminders that it’s not the production of the end result that makes us whatever it is we are: In the doing of the thing, we become.
Good luck this week and happy writing.