As a creative, I’m often caught in the trap of starting my workflow hoping motivation will strike. Especially when struggling with executive function and ongoing attempts at being disciplined in my practice. I often find motivation out of reach (because it feels easier than gaining momentum, and well, I’m tired).

There is a desirability when it comes to the idea of a creative spark: the craving for a fully formed idea to appear and present a clear path forward. It is seductive because it removes the boring work of discipline. If the muse shows up that day, then we’ve been chosen. But if the muse doesn’t show up that day, then it’s not our fault we couldn’t get any work done. We’re off the hook for showing up in the monotony of our creative practice.

I do believe creative downloads happen (and criticizing this idea probably seems antithetical to the essence of this Substack). But the truth is, much of our work gets done on the days we simply show up, even when we don’t feel like it.

Discipline in our creative practice isn’t the absence of a spark, it’s what makes its arrival so much more likely. Because what you make never arrives fully formed, it always requires the practice of building. 

No need to wait for permission from the muse to start creating. What you were actually waiting for was permission from yourself, dressed up as something else.

Some prompts/questions to sit with:

• What does “waiting for inspiration” protect me from?

• If the spark never arrived on my latest project, would I still be willing to build it?

• Would I still show up for my creative practice even if I didn’t necessarily feel “inspired”?

I’m historically practiced at prioritizing ease and smoothness in all areas of my life, though I’ve since shifted my priorities. I think about how I used to manage my tone in conflict before I even fully understood what I felt, and would edit myself ahead of time (and in real time) so I could enact a sense of control over how I was received. This smoothness didn’t provide me with the safety I thought it would; it only led to feeling unseen and misunderstood, and like my feelings would continue to fester inside of me. My true experiences were internalized for fear of being seen as too much.

Gratefully, my friends and loved ones have created a safer space to help me navigate conflict. I learned that expressing my true self and the messiness and complexity meant the right people would stick around and navigate it with me. With time and experience, I finally felt the courage to share what I was feeling in an imperfect way without rehearsing first. When it was received with grace and patience, this is where real intimacy and trust were built. I started to feel resiliency in a real, embodied way for the first time.

You might be curious as to why I’m talking about relational conflict on a Substack about indulging in your creative practice? Well, I think art is one of those places where we can sit with the unresolved without rushing to fix it. This is an internal practice where we can challenge inklings towards urgency and perfectionism. Our own personal creative practice allows us to navigate the mess within ourselves first, allowing us to extend this practice outward.

Freedom in our creative practice doesn’t come from chasing the perfect approach; it comes from the moments where we choose to navigate through the mess. The written piece that went through thirty drafts, the untouched zine ideas sitting in your notes graveyard, a half-finished painting you later donated. This expands our own capacity for what we can hold, pushing our technique and skill, prompting us to problem-solve, and fostering a curiosity to experiment with new ways of being.

Hope is generated in this place; it doesn’t occur in the absence of mess, but is evidence that we navigated through it. Each half-finished project becomes a practice for possibility, and proof that we can sit within failure and try again. Because hope isn’t a feeling we wait for, it’s what we’re left with after moving through something difficult and coming out intact. Hope is the trust built from having survived the process before, knowing we can survive it again.

When we are unable to tolerate friction, we are choosing control over freedom. The process of rupture and repair allows us the opportunity to fall apart and expand ourselves in the process. How we show up in our creative practice is a mirror for how we engage with our own liberatory practice.

Some prompts to sit with:

• Do I ever allow my creative process to feel messy?
• Where have I mistaken smoothness for safety?
• What have I made recently that I let stay unresolved, instead of forcing it toward a neat ending?

A conundrum on my mind lately is that ideas simultaneously feel like both an infinite and a finite resource. I find they come like wildfire and often die in my Notes App graveyard of ideas or drawer full of half-assed, completed brainstorms—because I couldn’t possibly have the capacity/time to explore every single one of them. 

Yet, when someone else produces something that feels oddly familiar to an existing creative seed I had, I feel a deep pang of regret that I didn’t make it myself. I slide into comparison mode, witnessing how this other person translated the idea through their own voice and medium, wondering if mine would actually have sucked by comparison (so I guess it’s good I didn’t bother making it then). 

I feel grief that this idea is now “gone.” As if two people aren’t allowed to explore the same idea. Misbelieving that there is some fixed number of good ideas in circulation, and that once someone else claims one, it’s no longer yours to touch. I was simply too slow / lazy / unmotivated / not a good creative / whatever.

This isn’t a talent or capacity problem; it’s a safety problem. The scarcity script doesn’t start within our creative practice; it lives somewhere older and deeper. We are conditioned to believe there is only room for a few voices at one time. Being seen feels competitive, and our creative practice becomes yet another arena for this fear to perform in. It creates its own paradox: if someone else has already made “the thing,” you don’t have to risk making your own version only to find out it didn’t matter or that no one cared. Scarcity creeps in when it’s trying to protect us from the prospect of being unnecessary, not capable, not good enough, not deserving. All shameful feelings that are antithetical to our creative process.

But someone else’s interpretation will never be the same as your idea— it’s proof that the idea was possible. No one else has your specific voice or talent. The scarcity script asks you to compete for airtime, but what you actually make doesn’t have any competition to begin with. There is always room for your interpretation.

There’s a specific fear in sharing something you made to the outside world. You broke off a piece of yourself to create a tangible work of art/writing/etc., and now you wait for a response.

We don’t talk enough about the hunger simmering underneath it all. Not for praise, but for recognition. The sentiment of “I witness what you were doing here, and it touched something in me.”

We may believe that “true” artists are indifferent to their audience and create from some internal self-fulfilling cup. But that’s just a protective shell dressed up as integrity. The desire to be witnessed for what we create isn’t a corruption of art; it lives at its core.

It’s a paradox when we deeply crave the very thing we fear. To be truly seen means there is nowhere for us to hide. It forces us to stand exposed, facing the risk that someone might look closely and still look away, or (worse) criticize what we created, which feels like an attack on the self.

Yet, the practice of being seen means sharing it anyway, despite the anticipated response. It means being audacious enough to share what’s true to us. Because keeping our ideas trapped inside becomes its own kind of discomfort that’s more difficult to diffuse.

Ever encountered someone else’s work or creative output and felt a pang of envy? Envy is often something we swallow, explain away, or dress up as something more acceptable, like admiration or inspiration. We’re usually taught to be ashamed of it.

What if envy wasn’t a flaw, but data?

Envy doesn’t attach itself to things at random; it tends to be super specific. You don’t feel it about everything or everyone, only when it touches on something unmet within ourselves. This specificity is worth paying attention to because it knows what you want before you’ve given yourself permission to want it.

The shame we feel makes sense because we are embedded with the sentiment that desire is dangerous. If we ask for too much, we are greedy, ungrateful, and never satisfied. Better to make ourselves small and ask for less, right? This kind of conditioning doesn’t make the wanting disappear, though; it just drives it deeper underground until it breeds resentment.

Instead of suppressing your envy, what if you approached it with curiosity. When you feel that pang, encountering someone’s life, work, or creative freedom, inspect it before dismissing it. Ask: What is landing on me here? What permission have they given themselves that you haven’t given yourself yet? 

Envy points us toward what we want and urges us to look in that direction. It will tell you something true about what you’re hungry for underneath it all.

There’s this quiet assumption embedded in how we approach work and talk about creativity: that time spent equals value earned. That a painting laboured over for a hundred hours is worth more than a sketch made in five minutes. That the piece you rewrote seventeen times matters more than the journal entry you dumped your messy and complicated feelings onto.

It even shows up when we talk about art and craft. Classical paintings are often praised for their technicality, compared to an abstract contemporary painting that “looks like something I could do.” But the act itself / the intent / the concept are the point.

We inherited this from somewhere older than capitalism, though capitalism made it gospel. Time = labour = value. We’ve internalized it so deeply that we often do not even notice when it’s shaping our relationship to our work. But what are we actually measuring here? Technical hours? Difficulty gets tangled up with value and meaning.

This is the same current that feeds urgency and perfectionism. We feel like we must “suffer” just enough to make the outcome deserving or worthwhile. The struggle feels like we are trying. On some level, it legitimizes our work.

Yet, if we are moved by something, then it took exactly as long as it needed to. An insight that arrives suddenly and with ease isn’t laziness, it’s listening. Some ideas arrive whole, and they aren’t any less valuable.

The ether doesn’t care how long it took, and neither should we.

What if time isn’t a countdown, but a current.

We’ve been taught to treat time like a precious resource that’s always running low, and we’re probably all guilty of battling this. Time is viewed as a commodity to be optimized, rationed, justified. And nowhere does that conditioning hit harder than in our creative lives via the guilt of a half-finished project, the shame of a slow season, and the anxiety of feeling like you’re falling behind.

Not all cultures have inherited the Western obsession with clock-time and linear productivity. Some traditions understand time as cyclical, relational, and expansive. Something you move with rather than race against, where time is a rhythm rather than a resource. That reframing alone is pretty radical.

Because here’s what urgency actually does to your creative flow: it closes you off from receptivity. You can’t listen when you’re bracing, and you can’t receive when you’re grasping. The ideas you’re searching for are waiting for you to slow down enough to hear them.

Reality, it turns out, doesn’t respond to urgency. It responds best to the slow, patient work of letting something land in our hands. Your practice doesn’t need to be biggest/faster/better; it needs you to be ready.