This is going to sound really dumb, but this utensil holder gave me a revelation today.
I've always hated this ugly, stainless steel utensil holder we have, so I started looking at new ones online. They cost upwards of $30 which is an absurd waste of money, and I don't know why, but I had this extremely 1999 idea that I could decoupage our old one with cool pictures. But I didn't have cool pictures. Or Mod Podge, both things I had in abundance as a magazine-buying teenager. But I did have fabric. And hot glue. And some jute ribbon I'd kept once, because I keep nice ribbons, because my grandma always kept nice ribbons to give me when I was growing up.
So I crafted some junk into this much cuter version of a utensil holder, and it felt SO. GOOD. This is what I DID growing up; I crafted and created and decorated. Not to try to monetise, not to try and emulate something I'd seen someone else do - just creating for the sake of creating.
Years ago (seven, in fact, and terrifyingly) Hank Green made a video where he said that the goal has to be to create more than we destroy, and when I was a kid, all I DID was create. But then I grew up and joined the real world, and had my heart shit on a bunch of times, and had to do things I hated to pay for things I needed, and it got less and less important to me to create until, evenually, I stopped. I always remembered Hank's words though, and have felt incredibly guilty about the fact that I've essentially become a black hole, not creating but merely consuming and destroying.
Since my early 20s, I've progressively felt less and less like myself, a lot of the time feeling nothing at all. I lost so much of myself to depression, anxiety, and desperately trying to claw my way out of the suffocating debt got into as a result, that I rarely took notice of anything outside of earning enough money to scrape by. Of course, that only caused deeper depression and worsened my anxiety, such was the tumultuous cycle I'd gotten myself stuck in.
I stopped writing because I didn't see how I could ever turn it into something that would earn me money. I stopped drawing and painting and making things because I wasn't as good as the people who did those things for a living. But you don't do those things for what they might gain for you; you do them simply to do them. The joy is in the doing of the thing, not in having done the thing and being able to sell it to someone else.
I have a god damn Master's degree in creative writing, but I've barely written a word since I graduated because it didn't seem like something I could make profitable. What the hell happened to me that I misunderstood the value of creating so profoundly?
I mean, lots of things, not least of all being raised by a capitalist society that became more and more demented the further down the rabbit hole of entrepreneurship we went.
So, this blog is the antidote to that. I'm going to write, ideally every day, but realistically as often as I have space to think. Not to entice followers with clickbaity bullshit and Pinterest-able images that will somehow alchemise into a profitable internet empire. But to create, for creation's sake.
