In the age of content creation, it’s hard to imagine making something that’s truly just for you. It’s easy to get caught in the magnetism of optimizing an artistic idea for other people. What will they like? What will they engage with? What will capture and hold their attention?
This way of thinking traps us in a mindset that directly inhibits our creative energy. It keeps us stuck in an endless loop of doubt, questioning, and trying to predict the verdicts of “our audience,” or worse, any random person. The process of art making is already riddled with questions.
Even when we’re creating for more traditional platforms, like a gallery or a festival application, we face many of the same doubts. And on top of it all sits the pressure that someone else could be executing our idea better than we can, or already is.
Oftentimes we’re left with the demoralizing question: what’s the point? If there’s no guarantee our art will have an outlet, or that anyone will care, why go through the process of creating at all?
It’s a soul-crushing thought. It also breaks my heart to think of all the bizarre and brilliant ideas that never got the chance to breathe because they were dismissed, doubted, and squashed into dust.
What if the process of bringing our wild, strange, beautiful ideas to life, in their most unapologetically imperfect forms, is the key to becoming more ourselves?
I believe that the more we deny our creative impulses, the more we abandon our authenticity, and the more lost we feel. That feeling can stay quiet if you silence it enough with busyness, career or financial accomplishments, substances, and so on. But when you’re left alone with your thoughts, the nagging emptiness is still there: a sense of being untethered, drifting, and alone.
For me, the antidote is small and unglamorous. It’s going into the studio to create choreography that no one may ever see. It’s making abstract drawings just for me. It’s writing poetry. Just getting the ideas out of my head gives me a sense of groundedness. I still want to share what I make sometimes. But I’ve learned that being witnessed isn’t the only way an idea becomes real. Sometimes I leave the studio with nothing to show anyone, and I feel more grounded simply because I went.
So maybe that’s the point of creating without a specific purpose: bringing ideas to life, even if no one ever sees, appreciates, or understands them, gives us a sense of purpose and peace. A sense of knowing who we are. It’s one of the truest ways I’ve found to get to know myself.
What’s one idea you’ve been holding back because no one’s waiting for it?
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