Want to get your bother on starting now?
Read the first chapter from my new book for a jolt of fresh perspective and possibility, and a radical reframe on what to do when you are feeling lost, blah, unmotivated, or burned out, in any area of your life or for any reason — even success!
Lately I’ve been hearing from students and friends two themes:
“Why bother to create when the world is in such crisis?”
and
“I’m beyond exhausted. As a person of color, I don’t have it in me to create right now yet I’m hurting without it.”
And for my readers of color, if there is anything I can do to support you, hit reply and tell me. I cannot presume to know what you’re experiencing so take what serves and chuck the rest–or chuck it all.
Here is what I believe:
Every person deserves to feel joy. You deserve to delight in images or color or words or patterns or whatever your heart delights in.
If creating makes you happy or gives you meaning or a dollop of pleasure, you deserve that.
You deserve to push back against every internal and external oppressive voice that heckles, how dare you? Who do you think you are? And why should anybody care? You deserve to shut those voices down by the profound act of making what you want.
You deserve to feel life living through you, taking shape, rejoicing in itself.
You deserve to create not because it serves the capitalist hustle culture but because you want to.
You deserve to bring into being what you envision and to exult in your creative agency. To celebrate your power and the truth: you matter.
My dear wise friend Hiro Boga said it best, “Creating will reveal and transform you and your life. There’s no getting away from it. You’re creating every moment of your life. The choice isn’t whether you create, but rather, whether you choose to do so consciously and in service to your vision of a freer, kinder, more just and joyous world.”
Whatever you can or cannot do right now, may you rest in the surety that your creativity is part of your soul and it won’t ever leave you. It’s there to nourish you when you are ready.
