Give yourself permission to be creative

“There’s no path until you walk it.” – Ethan Hawke

“Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry. Right? They have a life to live, and they’re not really that concerned with Allen Ginsberg’s poems or anybody’s poems, until their father dies, they go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don’t love you anymore, and all of a sudden, you’re desperate for making sense out of this life, and, “Has anybody ever felt this bad before? How did they come out of this cloud?” Or the inverse — something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes. You love them so much, you can’t even see straight. You know, you’re dizzy. “Did anybody feel like this before? What is happening to me?” And that’s when art’s not a luxury, it’s actually sustenance.”

There are so many wonderful and great artists out there. That includes you. Sometimes people won’t appreciate your work the way you’d like them to. But that’s not because your work is bad. They are just not feeling or seeing what they should at that moment. 

That’s why you keep creating. Not all of your work will speak to everyone all time. Some of your work will speak to some of the people every now and then. Accept that and keep moving forward.

“To express ourselves, we have to no know ourselves. To know ourselves, we have to express ourselves.”

When you don’t know where to begin, just start anywhere.

“There’s no path until you walk it.”

When it comes to your creative journey, do what you have to do. Allow the paintbrush to flow. Allow your fingers to flow over the keys of the piano or the typewriter. 

After every piece you create, you discover a piece of yourself. The more you know yourself, the more you’ll come to realise what it is you want to create, what it is you want to share with the world. 

“The pull of habit is so huge, and that’s what makes kids so beautifully creative, is that they don’t have any habits, and they don’t care if they’re any good or not, right? They’re not building a sandcastle going, “I think I’m going to be a really good sandcastle builder.” They just throw themselves at whatever project you put in front of them – dancing, doing a painting, building something: any opportunity they have, they try to use it to impress upon you their individuality. It’s so beautiful.”

There’s no worry about, “I won’t be good enough”. Kids just simply create. They allow their ‘right-brain’ full control of their creative work. There’s no judgement. There’s just imagination and creative fun.

When you are busy with your creative work. Be like a child. Allow your work to become an extension of you. When you’re busy creating, you need to block out all of the criticising voices inside your head. You need to be in your creative headspace and just do the work you can do so well. You need to allow yourself to create whatever it is you want. Don’t be overconfident, but also don’t criticise yourself too harshly. Accept that you’ve done the best you can at this time and just let it be.

“It’s a thing that worries me sometimes whenever you talk about creativity, because it can have this kind of feel that it’s just nice, you know, or it’s warm or it’s something pleasant. It’s not. It’s vital. It’s the way we heal each other. In singing our song, in telling our story, in inviting you to say, “Hey, listen to me, and I’ll listen to you,” we’re starting a dialogue. And when you do that, this healing happens, and we come out of our corners, and we start to witness each other’s common humanity. We start to assert it. And when we do that, really good things happen.”

Inspired by Ethan Hawke