Creative Purpose

I had to let go of either sort of changing my expectations slightly—and in some cases really profoundly—for what I was going to be working on and what I was going to be working toward.

Stress can really zap our creativity. And we are in a time of unprecedented stress, not just each of us personally, but collectively.

Creating in times of stress is like running in humidity. You can do it, it just requires a lot more effort. . . . It’s important to remember that and grant yourself some permission to go slower, to walk through this.

For anybody who is trying to show up creatively . . . and is struggling to do that, to think about giving yourself an assignment that’s really easy, in your comfort zone. Something that just requires showing up and doing something really simple. Because often it’s just starting that’s the hard part.

One of the ways that you can deal with your imagination causing you anxiety is to express it, to write it down, to make art about it, to talk about it openly.

Consider where you are now. Forget where you were two months ago, forget where you want to be. Where are you now? What are you experiencing? And using that as the fodder for whatever it is you’re going to make or write about, or even if that looks super different than what you would normally do.

Your imagination can be a very dangerous thing if you don’t express it.

It’s important just to grant yourself some grace in this situation. We all have to give each other and ourselves permission to not do what we had always imagined. This is not the ideal time, necessarily.