Freedom from Perfectionism
Part of what's hard about being a creator is the pressure to not stop once you've started. The pressure to constantly keep up with it and to constantly follow some sort of daily quota once you've established yourself as a creator.
Creating content for yourself or for an audience is incredibly stressful if you don't allow yourself to do it because you enjoy it but do it out of obligation.
Don't get me wrong. I enjoy creating content, I love to enjoy what I create and enjoy the vibe of my own artistic ability and work process.
But sometimes, you need to ask yourself if you really enjoy what you do. You need to ask yourself if you enjoy working on projects that mean something to you.
Not only does it become incredibly stressful to work on projects if you do them out of obligation and don't take a second to appreciate why you do it to begin with, but to stress about whether you're doing the project right or not. If you're approaching it the right way or not.
Something that I've sort of taught myself, something I've learned alongside my friends, and something that I saw that the creator of Invader Zim, Jhonen Vasquez, also came to the same conclusions about, is that there's no right way to approach something. Not just that there is no right way to approach a creative project, but there is no way to try if you don't allow for the possibility of failing. As long as you're confident that you can reach that end goal, it doesn't matter how many times that you fail as long as you made an effort to get there. You get to see something you created, and maybe it's not exactly what you imagined it would be but as long as you put in great effort and took it seriously while having fun with it, it could be an absolutely incredible end result even if it's different than you expected it to be.
The journey of being a creator and slowly doing things over and over again over time to kind of grow and blossom through trial and error is truly an incredible experience and something that shouldn't be resisted out of fear that you won't end up with the exact end result that you wanted. If you worry that the thing that you create won't be how you idealized it in your head, you'll be hesitating forever. You just have to go, and keep going, and have fun with it.
Now that being said, over the course of the past several years, since I would like to say 2014, I have not allowed myself to work on things when I want to for the fun of it. I've been doing it out of obligation. For the sake of my old fanbase. That's not fun, it's not ideal for someone that just wants to have fun with their life. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I finally managed to let go of that obligation from that website so that I could work on things that I'm passionate about in the future. I've been allowing myself to heal.
Again, having the mindset of "I'm just gonna work on this, even if I don't know how, and I'm gonna do it even if it doesn't go exactly the right way or how I expect it to go" is about the best way you can approach as a creator.
Starting now, I'm gonna do things that I enjoy to do. Obviously, I'll pay my bills when they're due. But aside from that, I'm gonna focus on doing things that I feel like doing in the moment. Hesitating, usually, is never what I actually want to do. Introspection occasionally can get me to where I want to go, and occasionally meditating can help if I don't want to think, but in general, everything should be done when I actually feel like doing it instead of doing it because of obligation, as if doing anything other than exactly what I want to do in that moment will make me happier than doing what will actually make me happy in that moment.
In other words, I know what will make me happy. It's a vibe. Once I regain my sense of flow after losing it for several years due to school and self-induced responsibility, I think I can actually start to pick myself up and move freely. This will allow me to bloom.
My soul.
