A place to be free.

Last weekend I spruced up my “office” at home. More than ever, I want it to be a place that inspires and frees me to create stuff. I don’t know what stuff, exactly, but I know I need to give my creativity room to breathe. For at least ten years, I’ve tried to limit it and label it and stuff it in a box, and whenever it escaped, I told it that it wasn’t good enough and imprisoned it again.

But now I’m beginning to learn the art of not caring. I’m trying to remember what it was like when I was a kid, before my inner critic woke up. I drew things and made things, and most of all, I wrote with abandon, because it made me happy. There was no pressure to produce something that pleased everyone else.

So I’m going to start spending more time in my office, with my art supplies and scrapbook paper and inspiration book, and hopefully writing too, just for the joy of creating something. I don’t know much about what I “should” be doing with my new life, but I do know that I need to take advantage of the quiet, because one way or another, it won’t last forever. So I’m opening the gate and setting myself free. We’ll see what develops.

I first read this quote back in May:

It’s all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I’d never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little; that isn’t what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.
– Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet