The messy middle of progress

Hi friend!

It's been a while since I've had something to say that I wanted to publish, and I thought I'd spend this post talking through that.

I actually drafted three other blog posts over the last three months, and they were lovely, but they were not what I wanted to share. They both seemed like the beginning of something, like I was holding my breath on top of a cliff, but I wasn't really ready to jump into the subject feet first. One of the "promises" I made myself when I started this newsletter was that I wouldn't be a perfectionist about it. It doesn't have to be published-author worthy, it doesn't have to be The Best One out there, and it doesn't even have to be consistent. It just has to be about my process.

My thought was that hopefully, over time, this would give me a bit of understanding of how I tick. How my creative process works. There's not a whole lot of immediate feedback in my work, and especially lately, I've wanted to keep the world at bay while I focused on figuring out what I wanted out of a project first before presenting it to the whole of the world.

Earlier in the year, I talked about how my relationship with writing has changed, and now I know that a lot of it is because my relationship with tracking my progress has changed. I've started to move away from producing a set amount of... well, anything, and instead relying on my instincts to measure progress. It's been a really big struggle, because I'm not only applying it here to my personal life, but also to my professional life. I've been recognizing that I'm up against a monumental task in this endeavor, too, since the metrics of productivity are supposed to be measurable by a visible product or an end result of some sort.

But I'm starting realize how much of a creativity-killer that expectation actually is, and it took my work life to really shine a light into this truth. I've spent the last 3-4 weeks working on writing test cases and training material for my intern -- a task that relies heavily on the creative side of my brain. And I've been fighting the urge to go faster, to produce more, because I already know the limits of my creative brain. I need to work on something for 1-2 hours, then switch gears, and then come back to it. I can't expect myself to keep creating for 8 hours without interruption. It just isn't how I work. (I don't actually think it's how anyone works.)

And I've been very vocal about it when asked about my progress at work. I never lie about where I am, but I've watched myself be very assertive and protective of my creative process. I've come upon the shining gem of a truth: My creative process is valid, regardless of how much I appear to be producing. It is always worth defending, but especially when I've actually been doing the work, and just need time to allow myself to think, and the production to happen on a more organic level.

All of this has made me realize that I struggle with my relationship with creativity -- not because of what I expect myself to produce but because of how I am perceived when I do honor the process and slow down. When I brought this up with my therapist this week about always being worried about how I am perceived, she said, "In 12-step programs, we say something that I think will be helpful here: other people's perception of you are none of your business."

Wow.

I mean, talk about freedom, right?

It was such a clarifying quote that I suddenly recognized this is both a part of life (since life itself is also inherently creative) and creativity at the core: I am recovering from people-pleasing, and that is showing up in my creative process. On the one hand, I'm learning to think through my processes for myself, to do what works for me, but also to remain conscious of other people and their existence interfacing with my own. That balance is absolutely important, but thinking about other people cannot be the sole factor of me living my life.

And again, it made me add to my therapist's advice with another eye-opening recognition: People-pleasing does not have a place in creativity. If I am creating, whether it's my life, my house, my crafts, my novel, or my newsletter, it is to share my creations as they are produced. I'm not here to mold any of these creations to other people's likings. Sure, I want to create something that people enjoy, can relate to, and even find meaning with -- but I want all of that to come out naturally. Audiences always know when they're being pandered to in a disingenuous way, because it takes away from the one thing people absolutely adore about art and the sharing of it: the element of the self. If I edit myself out of my creations, then what's the point?

As might be evident to other recovering people-pleasers out there, this is one of the hardest, most uncomfortable endeavors to undertake. Whether you're a writer or not, having a self requires authentic sharing, which can be nerve-wracking on it's own. Add the element of sharing thoughts publicly, no matter how small the audience, and it can really quickly devolve.

My way of dealing with this dilemma has been to share anyway. It started with sharing small things about myself, about a variety of wide topics, and devolved into, well, this blog. It also came without the necessity to pick apart my every word, every comma, every sentence for masterful flow or witty metaphors. It's enough, especially in this space, to get my ideas across without dressing up my thoughts. Maybe this is especially important since I work really hard on very intentional, poetic prose for Soultouch. This corner of the internet be my behind-the-scenes, where curious minds can peek, and hopefully, feel a little less alone in their own process.

I hope you will take this morsel of truth and apply it to your own life. I hope you allow yourself the space to create processes, to make what didn't exist before, and most importantly, to be messy. Really messy.

And my sincerest hope is that you find the bursting, explosive kind of happiness in your own creations.

Much love,

Yasi