Bedside musings on the risk of creativity

The fear of not being good enough rules my life.

There is good that comes from this fact.  I work hard.  I never miss deadlines.  When I commit to a task I am 100% reliable and my employers have been known to take advantage of this tendency.  If someone keeps meeting every goal you set, its pretty easy to keep setting the bar higher, and higher and then higher still.  It is not in my character to say "I can't do that."  I just keep trying like some terrified energizer bunny.

The fact is I have achieved a lot in my life.  I have a successful career, a solid happy family and a lovely home.  In SL for two years I was a paid writer for a blog with a huge readership. More recently, I have had the privilege of working with two of the most amazing art curators in Second Life and I have been able to learn from them while bringing great art to the community.  This little blog of mine has been around for 4 years and still gets page views even when I have not written a word for months.  I have much to be proud of and much for which I am very grateful -- not the least of which are the amazing people in my life who love me.

Having said all of that -- once the "I am not good enough" freight train starts running through my head there is very little to stop it from invading my thoughts and stealing my focus.  I tend to minimize my achievements and instead focus on the ways in which I could have done more.   I thought about sharing a taste of my inner dialog and even wrote out a long paragraph, which I just deleted -- why?  Well its not good enough to share of course.

See what I just did there?

All of this is to say, I stopped blogging for a while because every time I started to write I thought about all the other people who's images are better than mine and who's thoughts are more insightful and who have better recommendations about fabulous places you should check out.  I would write three paragraphs and then think "they should just read so and so and that other person and I suck at this and I am not going to blog today."  Then today turned into this week and this month and pretty soon it was looking like my blog was dead, my SL was over and my muse had left the country.

This morning I woke up and started thinking about creativity even before I got out of bed.  It seems to me an essential part of expression is committing to the risk of being creative.  Some days your work is going to stink. There is no way around that fact.  But, the key to being good at anything is keeping at it and trying to give your best effort every day.

Yes.  I do think I am back.  I missed you.