Your personal, private creativity
I speak with a lot of writers who are working hard to overcome their fear of sharing their work, whether it’s with a small, select number of friends or a larger, mostly unknown online audience.
A lot of time and space is given to this dilemma, and rightfully so: between harmful classroom experiences, academic wounding, and traumas that intersect with our sense of empowerment, creativity is one of those places where our wounds tend to show up most potently, making the impulse to hide our creations a strong one.
But what happens once we’ve healed the wounds and begun building a healthier relationship with sharing our work? Does that mean our creativity lives wholly out there, always public-facing and for everyone else to see?
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If you’ve been in my creative ecosystem for any amount of time, you won’t be surprised to hear that my answer is a strong, unwavering “no.” Even a healthy relationship to publishing our work doesn’t get to define our creative work entirely. It’s vital that we see sharing our words with others as one part, not the whole thing; it is an aspect of creativity—and an optional one at that—but it cannot claim ownership.
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So what does a strong, private relationship with creativity look like?
It looks like you turning to the page to drum up insight, purge hard thoughts, untangle a new idea, or practice self-expression—and then refusing the obligation to do something more with it.
It looks like protecting the internal-emotional-cosmic thing inside you, your creative channel, and honoring it as the sacred relationship it really is.
It looks like writing poems or stories or personal essays because you like writing poems or stories or personal essays, because it’s fun or satisfying or pleasurable to do so, and that’s a good enough reason to do it, period.
It looks like reveling in the secret joy of making things for you and you alone.
It looks like turning to the page as a stabilizing emotional force. I’ve seen it happen again and again: How writing becomes a way of talking to oneself. And therefore of listening, understanding, and healing. To describe it as therapeutic is an understatement.
It looks like deepening your relationship with your ancestry and/or spirituality, because creativity can be in direct dialogue with the ethereal world.
It looks like private magic. Because creativity is private magic. And it does not need to earn its place in your life through external accomplishments.
What I want you to know today:
There is a part of your creative world that is yours and yours alone. It is necessarily private and internal. It is necessarily hard to share with others, because trying to do so would turn it into something else.
You are allowed to protect this part—to even feel excitement and enthusiasm for it. It is a rich, dynamic secret you get to carry around inside you, this interesting and healthy and artistic relationship that you, and nobody else, gets to belong to.
