Your creative voice matters.
It matters more than algorithms.
It matters more than the size of your audience, the fanciest AI or your cruelest haters.
It matters more than the voice in your head’s reasons why you’re not far along enough, perfect enough, or ready.
It matters because how you see the world, and how you express what you see is a sacred gift only you can give. It matters because progressive changes happens when hopeful people say yes to their voices and use them for good. It matters because bringing forth your truth is how you become your realest self.
Your creative voice matters.
Right now. Today. In the very moment you are reading this.
Not when you get your ducks in a row, have more time on your calendar for your projects, or start posting on social media again. Not when you get your Netflix special or win an award or land your book deal. Not when you become as popular as the person you keep comparing yourself to on instagram, nail the perfect niche, design the perfect website, or clarify your perfect creative idea.
Not when you finally figure yourself out or make more money from your art. Now. Right now.
How you see the world – what you love about it and what you refuse to let it get away with — the questions you have to ask it, and the utterly unique ways you will channel those questions — will never be repeated in the history of time.
Your curiosity matters. Your ideas matter. Your love of things matters.
Even if you don’t (yet) have the funding, the time, or a place where you feel you belong. Even if your body of work doesn’t fit together like a perfect career puzzle. Even if you feel like you’ve lost your magic, the drafts feel endlessly shitty, or the people in power refuse to fully recognize and compensate you for your contributions.
(I’m standing with all of you brave writers out there striking for fair wages and protection).
Even if you are called to turn left when everyone else is telling you to turn right.
Your creative voice matters.
Whether you are expressing it right now with a script or a cello or a movement modality or a start-up or soft words to a child or a podcast or a way of seeing or one truthful sentence.
Or maybe something yet to be born.
Your creative voice doesn’t want you to have all the answers. In fact, her flourishing only requires a few things from you — attention, permission, energy, and, most importantly — to take the pressure off being perfect and a genius, and to be reminded that her worth is not conditional on your achievements. That she matters because she exists. And her only job is to be who she is.
But the pressure is real. Freeing your creative voice in a culture designed to keep you quiet and diminished requires a kind of wild audacity.
Every beautiful, creative thing you love in this world exists because someone gave their voices and visions the audacious permission to matter before anyone else decided they did.
So let today be the day you source the courage to trust and honor your singular voice. And let it also be the day you decide to let yourself be human as you go — bumpy, uncomfortable, sweaty, confused, insecure, angsty, imperfect.
Being brave rarely feels like what we imagine it looks like.
Some days, the voice in my head is so demanding of perfection and greatness that my creativity doesn’t have enough breathing room to begin. But on my better days, I work with 5 rules for creating anything:
- Show up
- Turn off the noise
- Tell the truth
- Forgive yourself
- Be open to what comes up
And: treat your collaborators with delight and respect.*
*this includes you.
These rules are adapted from an original framework from Tom Truss, a grad school teacher of mine who taught me how to be creatively free. Following these rules takes immense courage and surrender because they require you to unhook your worth from your output. Defining success by showing up instead of results is a profound reflection of your decision to matter unconditionally.
Most of the time, our formal training and cultural conditioning link our creative worth to our performance, but while this may provide a kind of (unsustainable) drive, it puts a cap on our ability to do our truest, freest, greatest work. This year, my therapist boldly called me on how deeply I define my worth through my achievements, and this (painful) ah-ha unlocked what for me the part that’s so hard for our Inner Critics to understand, but what I’ve learned from thousands of hours of working with creators — that the more we release the pressure to excel at all costs, the more we liberate our true creative greatness.
Deciding that your voice matters — regardless of what you produce and achieve — is the most important decision you will ever make for your creative expansion.
Speaking of, here’s a playlist for your Creative Expansion, because sometimes music does what words can’t.
And please hear me on this:
You don’t need to have all of the answers. You don’t have to exhaust yourself in a million doings. You don’t even need to have all of the faith. You just need to remember that you are unrepeatable, and you have nothing to prove.
Whatever is calling you — you were born for it. Wherever you are — you are closer than you think.
Your creative voice matters. (Don’t forget this)
And keep going.
