Today I am talking about giving ourselves permission to be creative. Also, why I sometimes end a video by saying "Now get up and go make something". They are kind of the same thing.
Please feel free to leave a comment about your own ideas (and questions) about giving ourselves permission to create and the power of creating in our everyday lives.
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If you've some of my posts here on KZfaq you know that I often wrap up by saying "Now, get up and go make something". Now the first time I said this I was basically trying out tag lines, looking for a pithy sign-off. Well, that's not what happened.
Instead, from the first time I said it and put it out there, I started getting feedback and since then it has come regularly, something like "The end of the video came and I was about to do something else but you said go make something and I thought, yeah, I will and I did and it was what I needed to hear."
Well that made me think: maybe we do need to be reminded so I decided to turn that tag line into a whole post that is nothing but a reminder that we all of us need to remember to get up and make something, to be creative in our own, one, everyday, precious life.
Because one thing I know, if you are cautious and ration out that permission to be creative and take up creative space you may well come to the end of your life with that precious permission saved up and never used, like a wallet full of unspent gift cards.
We’re already hearing way too much from our inner critic. What if others judge me? What if people think that I think I'm someone special because I want to make something and I think I could if I tried, if I gave myself permission to mess up these blank pages, get something down on a page, canvas, book, a piece of cloth?
Is that selfish? Are we getting above ourselves? If this has never crossed your mind you are one of the lucky ones. I make art for a living and I find this thought circling round the outskirts trying to find a way to get closer all the darn time. It's just the way things are, ingrained since early days and crazy hard to get past and make no mistake, running it off time after time after time takes vigilance.
If not, we are faced with our inner critic who wants to know who do we think we are? Where do we find the courage to find and hear that other voice that gives us permission tells us that says that we can begin?
Well I'm saying it. Let me tell you who you are. You are someone who deserves to make a mess in perfect pristine pages, you deserve to draw and write and glue and sew and sing and go big. Or at least bigger. You are good enough and you know what you need to know to begin, even if all you know is that you want to begin and aren't sure where to start. You're here, aren't you?
Then there's this. Not only are you good enough to do this, not only do you deserve to do this, you need to be doing this: making is important and if you don't do it who will? A page, a card, a junk journal, a slow-stitched fragment, a mixed media something or other. This messy world needs you to make something - yes you.
You don't have to be wildly bold just a little because here's the deal - as you give yourself permission to play show up and make something then you are giving everyone else around you permission to do the same and when that happens we will find out that we are all being just a little bolder and I believe in my heart and in my soul that if a whole bunch of us are just a little bolder and truer we become tiny centres of light and this will change the world and make it a better place or at least a less messy one. At least a more creative one.
Happy making. And get up and go make something. It matters.