What do you do when you don't know what you're doing? When you're questioning everything? When you're burnt out, or stuck, or confused?
You make things. With humility, and surrender, and servitude.
You stand at your desk, or at your work space, and you ask yourself "what does my heart need to exist here, now, at this time, in this place?" What does my every sensory receptor in my every finger need to touch and taste? What is it that I most want to make?
You find a thread and you heave. You follow where it leads. You wonder. You wander. You lean hard into your curiosity.
Every question gets answered when you keep making and you let the making guide you.
The work knows more than you do. It is made of the same sure substance as your breathing. It knows what it wants. What it wants to become. What it wants you to be.
You trust the work, you serve it, you submit yourself to the pulse of it's pulling. You let it find and refine you in every conceivable and inconceivable way.
What do you do when you don't know what to do? When you’re not even sure who or what you are anymore?
Abandon all your grand ideas, all your grand titles, all the names, and categories. Relinquish everything that wafts of self-importance or grandiosity.
You don't need to be a painter, or a photographer, or a writer, or an artist, a musician, or a poet. You don't need to create like them. You don’t need to create what they do, Cheryl Strayed says, you just need create "like a motherfucker".
You just need to make things.
Like only you can do.
In case no one has told you today, I love you with all of my everything.
**Special thanks to for the vibrant conversation that inspired this, to ’s post “Adopt A Beginner's Mindset” that gave more to chew on regarding the subject, and to ’s post “Tabula Rasa (with caveats)” for finally convincing me that maybe this was something worth saying.
Duane...my goodness. These words are delightfully slice-down-to-the-core-of-it real. that space of making. With this piece you articulate the creative process, the one we enter where the critic quiets, the comparison stops and we are faced with just us. what our body knows, our work shows. Loved it.
I absolutely love this. Sometimes the only way through confusion or burnout is just to start making something, anything. The act of creating becomes its own kind of answer, even when you’re not sure what the question is. It’s not about labels or titles, just about showing up with curiosity and letting the work shape you. Thanks for putting this into words. It’s exactly what I needed to hear.