The audacity of being creative

Yesterday, I Googled “I have no idea what I’m doing with my life,” and Google’s AI told me to take a deep breath. Thanks, Google.

Today, I am faced with a question that feels somehow bigger than that: What if I know exactly what I want to do with my life?

I have always been a writer.

When I was six, Highlights published a poem I wrote about my comfort blankie, which, in retrospect, is both embarrassing and pretty cool.

When I was in the fourth grade, I wrote a story that I made my entire class listen to because I was *like that*. I don’t even remember what it was about, but I remember that it poured out of me. I remember that it covered pages and pages of college-ruled paper, front and back. I remember the feeling of exhilaration as the words kept coming. I don’t remember what I did with it after it was finished.

Words are the thing that make sense to me. When I’m stressed, when I’m sad, when my brain is in pieces, it’s writing that I turn to. From journaling to small story snippets to bad poems to many unfinished romance-esque novels, it’s writing that puts me back together when I fall apart.

Over and over, when I have imagined my future life in some way, there is always some sort of writing involved. The type of writing has shifted, but writing has always been the core.

There are two types of creatives: the creatives who create their art for themselves and absolutely no one else (respect, honestly), and the creatives who create things because they want them to be consumed. There’s some overlap, for sure, but I am firmly in the second camp.

I want to move people with my work. I want to create a tangible impact on someone’s life with my art. This becomes a problem when I also struggle with showing it to anyone.

Sarah Dewald recently said something similar in her essay about the embarrassment of wanting what you want, and it stopped me in my tracks as I was reading. It hit a nerve so deep that it was impossible to ignore. It shifted the conversation in my brain from “What do I want?” to “How do I get what I want?”

I kind of want to expand on it too because it’s not just that wanting something that feels so big and important feels unrealistic. It’s that it demands a level of audacity from you.

Being a creative person who wants to do something creative with their life requires you to be audacious in a way that can feel almost delusional to yourself (and sometimes to others). You have to have the audacity to believe that you can succeed. That you are worthy of attention. That your work does, in fact, have the capacity to move people.

You have something to say. You are worth listening to. Therefore, you’re going to put your work out into the world and demand that people pay attention to you. Something that’s increasingly difficult in a society in which the number one biggest commodity is attention.

That’s audacious.

Which, depending on who you are, is terrifying. I certainly find it to be so. It’s not even just that it requires me to think I am worth reading, but it requires me to think that to the point where I am willing to balance that with three children, a full-time job, and a need to seriously take care of my health. I have limited time and energy, and writing feels too big.

Looking back, I think it started around grad school when I found myself surrounded by outrageously smart people who inspired a level of imposter syndrome that never went away after. I got timid and nervous. I lost faith in myself and my abilities.

But grad school is years past, and it’s been too long since I’ve been willing to put myself out there and say, “I am worthy of being listened to.” What happens if I start being audacious again?

I guess we’ll find out.