What holds you back from creating? Risking mediocrity and failure is the price of putting yourself out there- creating anything new. Be this an artistic expression, a relationship, an invention, a new philosophy, or any way you brave your personal yawp out in to the world. It can feel terrifying, holding simultaneously the likelihood of failure as well as the potential of glory.

What is your trick to get started? Write “make bad art” at the top of your blank page to scribble on? Burble out three pages stream of consciousness to get the juices flowing? Take any step, no matter how infinitesimally small, to build that commitment to yourself, find the pleasure in the process regardless of the outcome.

Creating anything at all is also facing the gutting and heart-wrenched face of destruction. For the reality is, it’s not a matter of if, but surely when, destruction will come to pass. We can zoom out to the heat death of our known solar system when our beloved Sun evolves into a red giant some 5 billion years from now. We can zoom in, to each moment dying into the next and the next. Regardless, holding the tension that every beginning has an end and surrendering to its inevitability can deepen the creative process and free unconscious resistance.

Yes, so why create at all, why struggle to hold the tension, the paradox, the pain? Well, beauty for one, and inspiration, joy, longing, and most certainly love. What is your reason for creating? Is it more of a monster on your back but an even more hellish feeling when it’s gone? Is it an expression of pain, loneliness, heartache? Could your creation knit your own heart back together or save a life?

I didn’t know I needed art so badly until I did; poetry became my medicine- reading lines again and again through eyes blurred with tears. Breaking my heart open and filling me with awe.

This message is for you. Yes, you who are reading this right now. I dare you- create something. A hum of a song just for yourself, a doodle, a bad poem, a civilization. No matter how rusty or incapable you feel, no matter how paralyzed with fears of success or failure. Make it simple, make it real. And after all, isn’t destruction just a different type of creation?