Doechii NPR Tiny Desk Performance + Have You Been Making Out Ok – Al Green

Over the past decade plus, I have been working on breaking down the scaffolding in my brain that constrains all my ideas and thoughts to a black-and-white binary. I think (like many other humans) I find comfort in certainty and what can be exact, but that comfort comes at the expense of experience. I sometimes hold myself within this paradoxical prism where I only want to participate in/do things I’m “good at” (all ego-driven btw), but by not doing things I’m not “good” at, I limit my capacity to try, to improve, and, most importantly, to create and be free. YOU (directly talking to myself atp) can get so caught up in producing something that you deem worthy or consequential when the purpose is not to do but to be. To focus on the journey rather than the destination. And ironically, the more you venture on a journey, the more effortless it becomes to find the destination. It’s really easy (especially when your creative work becomes your source of income) to become so attached to and bound to the final product that you lose sight of the fact that we aren’t programmed to create to live; we should be living to create.

I can get so bogged down with the noise of grammatical structures, focusing too much on how what I’m writing sounds and trying to know or control the direction I’m going in too forcefully, that I forget to just fucking catch a raw vibe and write. It’s nonsensical that my fingers could even choke up when they touch the keyboard, because I am constantly in robust dialogue with myself (inside and outside of my head, tbh), so much so that I have to consciously remind myself to stop thinking and talking (a big reason why I meditate daily). So I know that when I freeze at the keyboard, it’s not because the well has run dry. The channel in which my thoughts travel has become congested. Polluted, stagnant even, clogged with the molasses of doubt, frustration, and fear. Once that buildup starts, overwhelm follows shortly after, along with the urge to abandon the whole thing altogether. This exact loop is what I inadvertently hope this blog can eliminate cuz PMO, the way this thinking holds me back. How it feels to recognize the cycle but not have broken it yet:

I don’t believe that creativity is a limited resource; rather, it’s a channel we all have within ourselves and all around us. Whether we can tune into that channel depends on our frequency. There is no such thing as “having” creativity because it’s not something you can possess, only express. When you feel like you’re “lacking creativity,” it’s less about your inherent creativity and more about whether you’re open and receptive enough to receive the creativity around you (so Rick Rubin core). You limit your ability to explore, create, and even improve when you place external pressures and values on the most intrinsic thing a human can do: create. Landmark reminder to myself: just make or do whatever my ego is holding me back from attempting. And if you face any frustration or blockage in the process, shake off the crustaceans of doubt from your mind and keep pushing forward. Any limitations surrounding access to creativity are man-made; creativity’s abundance knows no bounds! Egoic attachments will only hinder your capability. Just in case you forgot, the only way out is through mama!