choosing creativity over social life

What I used to keep hidden has become my daily joy.

Endless ideas, visuals, dreams, things to paint, words to explore, ways to look at the world anew. When I am alone, I am anything but alone. There is always something to see, act on, dance with, and discover through creative experimentation. Always.

Sometimes it makes it difficult to go to sleep at night, because I still have more I want to work on! Sometimes it makes me forget to eat, and a 3pm headache rolls around like clockwork. How have I forgotten food again?! Most of the time, it makes me appear aloof to those who look upon me and think “Surely, something must be wrong here.”

For so long I feared being seen as “weird” and being left behind by not maintaining my networks - “necessary support systems” as they are often described by those who assure me my preferences are odd. And so, I spent too much time suppressing my need to live with art, because I desperately wanted to avoid these inevitable outcomes.

But when I first started exploring the choice to be alone, and practicing saying “no” to social plans, obligations, and expectations of all sorts… I did so because I needed more time to create. It was that simple. My days - with their routines, maintenance of things, & participation through some ongoing form of income - left little time to go deep into the experiences that move me. Social stuff was already low on my hierarchy of interest, so it was the first to release in my experiment for more space.

Now I’m a seasoned pro. My daily life has been designed as a system prioritizing both physical maintenance & creative input/output. It sustains itself by those two alternating functions, with a few occasional other things. In this way, I feel like a computer - if computers were to have feelings as I playfully imagine them to. And I’m not weirded out by it in the slightest.

*semi-unrelated sidenote: (Although it seems counterintuitive to the current narratives, I do see the present cultural shift with technological development as something to celebrate - what potential there is for creative human experience, in a world changing its very foundations! But alas, that is no topic for today.) In this moment, I’m writing about the choice to opt out of having a social life, at least in the traditional terms and conditions. And how the most frightening thing about it, was thinking nothing would live on in its place. But something always fills a space. As long as we’re paying attention, we get to decide how intentional it is - or not.

May 6th, 2026 - I am looking ahead to today:

Finish coffee, finish writing this, start an underpainting, begin filling in another underpainting, capture moments of the art making, listen to that new song I found, get some business work done so I can continue doing all these things, remember to eat food! remember to drink enough water! remember to move around every so often so my muscles don’t atrophy! breathe fresh air! clean the shower!

…and who knows what else may pop up beyond my scope of expected happenings, whether it be in the world around me or my own inner landscape. I’m not entirely sure what people think when they look at my life and my preference to be alone all the time. But it isn’t nearly as empty as many of them have assumed. If only I had even more time to explore!

find my art here: www.jasminecherry.com/art