Writing makes me completely nuts, and I'd like to explain

I meant for this post to cover “how to be a creative writer,” but decided to just share what it’s like to struggle as a creative person.

Honestly, I'm not really sure how to start this post. If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that I never post in predictable intervals. As much as I want to blame it on having a full time job, the real reason is that writing this blog has made me a far more crazy person than I had ever been before (and I already was pretty crazy to begin with).

Writing this blog is an act of love for me. It's a space where I can be fully myself and do what I want, and it's gone far better than I could have possibly expected. On one hand, this makes me incredibly grateful. On the other hand, this makes me care in such a deep, personal way that I am now completely nuts, and I'd like to explain.

For starters, a self-initiated and totally amorphous project like writing a blog is a perfect storm of craziness for a neurotic person. Even if I spent years on a blog post, there'd still be room for improvement. When I first started this blog, the combination of deeply caring and knowing how much I had to improve was utter hell for my brain. And it still is, when I produce something that isn't quite right or I don't totally love, or if it doesn't resonate with you.

In addition, I chose to wholesale ignore all advice about how to write a successful blog, because it seemed like it would suck my soul. Instead, I followed a couple of gut instincts, to write what I know and care about, and trust that smart people who want to read stuff with substance would be OK with it. Over the past eight years I've been writing, the only metrics I've tracked are organic shares and IP address activity, on the assumption that my work is resonating if people care enough to share it, and spend a lot of time on this site when they find it.

When I first started, this made me insane because I got no shares and people bounced and I realized how deeply I sucked. Now it's insane because you have to track these manually which gets hard as you grow, which brings me to my next point.

The paradox of becoming slightly successful with a creative venture is that it makes you care what other people think, when not caring was what made you successful in the first place.

On top of how personally I take everything, and how blithely I ignore blogging experts, I'm in the fortunate position to have a lot of readers, which is incredible but also terrifying, because every time I write something, I'm profoundly afraid of disappointing you. When you have barely any readers, it's pretty easy to test stuff and try to find the intersection of what you care to write about, and what is useful to other people. 

Once you find that intersection point, and there are a lot of people paying attention, you start thinking this: "They're all gonna leave, they're all gonna leave, they're all gonna leave, they're all gonna leave." 

This drives you to overindex on what people want, at the expense of what you care to write. And it's maddening because it's a positive reinforcement cycle, where you're not taking risks because you're so focused on what other people want, that you lose your voice and your passion that got you started to begin with.

If you want to be more creative, you have to look inward instead of outward.

So this brings me to my point, which is that I'm coming out of a creative fog where I'd lost my voice and my passion because I was overindexing on what everyone else wanted to read, instead of finding the intersection between that, and what I care to write about.

The thought of sitting down to write this blog sapped my energy and felt like work instead of the labor of love it has always been, which is why I struggled to post regularly. I started to hate Instagram for making me think I should be less of the weirdo that I am, and more consumable. Instead of stretching myself, seeking to grow and share what I've been learning, I became stagnant and uncreative.

If I'm being honest, the reason I decided to take a 6-month sabbatical from work is because I sensed something was off, that something core to who I am was out of alignment with the way I was living my life. Deep down, I already knew that my creative energy was waning because I’d lost my way and blocked it with a bunch of stuff that didn't matter.  

Part of me thought that focusing the time on building a creativity workshop series at The Art Institute of Chicago would give me the reboot I needed.

In reality, what I actually needed was introspection and time to reflect, and quarantine cancelling my art workshops oddly turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It made me think deeply about the problem I was really trying to solve with my sabbatical project: to teach what I know about living a creative life, and take my own advice.

What was intended to be a workshop in a museum became a daily writing practice for me to share research, inspiration and personal perspectives on creativity, exactly what I needed to recognize where I'd gone off course.

How to get out of a creative rut is not an easy question to answer, but I think it involves going back to your “why” that got you started in the first place.

The readership of this blog has been built on the philosophy of "write what you know," centered around the message of my favorite E. E. Cummings poem that's been my life mantra since 8th grade: "To be nobody but yourself, in a world that does its best, day and night, to make you everybody else, is to fight the hardest battle that any human being can fight and never stop fighting."

Although I've always believed that looking inward, tuning in to my intuition and what I feel called to do, is where I find truth and inspiration, somewhere along the way I started looking outward instead. I allowed external influences to take hold in my mind, started orienting myself around the expectations of others, and found myself coming up short, clouding my creativity with self-doubt.

I stopped fighting the battle that E.E. Cummings warned me about, and let the world start making me into everybody else.

You may have sensed a bit of a shift on this blog, and extensions of it like my newsletter. That’s me fighting again, tuning inward, dropping expectations, releasing the fears that have been blocking my creativity, and sharing what I know and truly care about. 

Thank you for being the most amazing readers I could ever ask for, for your incredible response to my recent newsletters and posts that have refocused on what I know and truly care about, instead of what I think you want to read. We’ll get back to that intersection we once had, and I so appreciate you letting me take risks here in the meantime as I grow as a person and as a writer.

As always, I welcome your thoughts and feedback in the comments. This is a labor of love, and it's for you.

Love,

Colleen