Am I Even Allowed To Create This?

The permission to be an artist, not an expert

I’m sitting in my beloved local café. The sun is peeking back and forth behind clouds, not quite sure if it wants to shine or not. I’m lapping up every ray of it that comes through the window.

The whole day has been spent thinking about my vision for this space, The Good Creative Life, my Substack. I’ve penned thoughts and ideas that have been swirling in my mind the past weeks since I decided to build this space. It has been a powerful force, prodding and pulling, making me jot down post ideas in my phone for weeks. I’m currently up to 18 ideas, and that’s without attempting to come up with any at all.

My inspiration has been so all consuming, I first don’t recognise the resistance slowly surfacing. The fear trickling in like water through cracks. I shut the laptop. I go home. I wonder: am I even allowed to create this?

Letting my writer self take the lead

For years now, there has been two sides to my creative life. Two identities collaborating and competing for attention. The first, the original, is my writer self. She’s the one who started writing a novel in a black notebook when she was stressed about her bachelor’s thesis. She spent hours in cafés working on that novel. She started blogging to face the fears she felt in her creative process. She’s the one who has kept sharing her creative journey, kept writing about the lessons learned, kept trying to understand what it means to be a creative human, to live a creative life.

The other side is the creative coach. The entrepreneur. The part of me who loves thinking about strategies, to dream up products and communication plans. She took what my writer self created and turned it into a business. At first, she was shy and insecure, but over time she took up more and more space in my creative life.

My idea to start this Substack was my writer self putting her foot down. Too long had she felt like her work was never prioritised or valued. She whispered: it’s my turn now.

I knew right from the start of toying with this idea that I wanted to bring the energy I have around my blog to Substack. And my blog is where I’ve allowed my writer self the freedom to create whatever she wanted to.

Sitting there in my local café working on my vision, I realised that if I follow it, I’m handing over the reins to my writer self. I have to trust her. I have to give her space to make the calls. And that shook my strategic, business-friendly creative coach self to her very core.

Why do we not feel permission to be artists?

The funny thing about this fear is that I’ve seen it so many times before. In myself? Sure. But mostly, I’ve seen it my coaching clients. How many times have I talked to creatives who really want to embrace their inner artist and create for self-expression and their love for the craft, but feel they can’t? How many times have I guided creatives through the pressures to always be helpful, to create strategically, to be an expert, to be predictable? Too many to count.

I believe this is a reflection of our current cultural context. We’re in the era of artists gaining some of the control formerly held by gatekeepers like art galleries, publishers and record labels. That also gives us responsibilities that used to be theirs. Of market analysis, promotion, networking, positioning.

And yet, this era is only just beginning. We haven’t quite figured it out yet. We’re still trying to understand how to be artists in this new way.

Much of the advice for creatives wanting to promote themselves online have been inspired by regular business strategies. Things like providing value. That’s a foundation for business. In women, this advice to always be providing value then mingles with the expectation to exist in service of others. And voilà, we have a generation of artists who feel that art isn’t enough on its own.

But I wonder, do record labels consider whether the singer they might sign with is providing value? Does gallery curators look at paintings and wonder if people will find them helpful? Does publishers write five results you’ll get from reading their new novel on the back of it? Of course not. It’s art. Its value is measured differently.

These are thoughts I have been thinking since working on my vision for The Good Creative Life. Because my vision is not about who it will help and how. It’s not a neat one sentence explanation of the value you’ll get from subscribing. Honestly, it’s a quite introspective vision, because it’s a vision about the process of creating much more than the outcome.

Writing born in the process, in the interaction between life and creativity

When I worked on my vision, I went back over the some 140ish posts I’ve written on my blog. I picked out the ones that were my favourites, listed them all up. Looked at what they said about my writing, about me as a writer.

Almost all of them had one thing in common: they were somehow born in my creative process. The post about habits that balance intention, inspiration and intuition. The one about slow living lessons from a tiny island in the archipelago. The one about my dissatisfaction with my curated Instagram posts. Some were more storytelling, others more practical. But they all began in the process.

It’s not only that they truly reflected something that interested me at the time, rather than something I felt I should write about. (Though there was that too.) It’s that these posts were better. They were more creative, more well-written, with more deliberately chosen photos.

I am a better writer when my writing begins in my process. In the interaction between life and creativity. In the things I’m learning, pondering, figuring out. In the things that bother me, in the things that fascinate me. In trying to understand the creative life. That is the art.

So my vision then, what is it? It is to write there, in that space. It’s to nourish my process by going on creative adventures and writing about them. It’s to learn new things and share them. It’s to pursue projects and write about the process. It’s to tell stories. It’s to trust my writer self. That’s my vision for The Good Creative Life.

My hope is that it will be an inspiration for you too. That it will spark reflections about your own creativity. That my words will give you new insights, make you feel validated, give you ideas for your creative life. Will it do that? I’m not to say. I’m just here to write.

Do you feel permission to be an artist? Share your thoughts in the comments!