It’s been a busy creative week, but most of my creativity has gone into writing, which, when I sit down to write about what I’ve done, makes me feel awkward about not hitting the goals I had in mind.
On the other hand, looking back at where my time has gone made me realise just how much has actually been done.
Feeling slightly dissatisfied?
This week I’ve been less artist than writer, businesswoman and agony aunt.
In the last week, I’ve worked on eight articles and published six of them, with the other two due to go live in a few days. In some cases, creating the visuals for the articles has taken longer than preparing the text.
These all live on platforms I built from scratch and control myself. I worked hard for a few years to get to the point where a blog could earn me money and now can say I earn money from my writing on my own terms.
Not bad, right?
Yet I still find myself feeling bad because I haven’t been able to work on the newer projects I wanted to. Today I’m trying to work around that by writing it away.
I’ve created a communication machine
One morning when I had planned to plough through some writing, I got an email from a reader, asking for advice.
This was on a different site, on a subject that’s very difficult and very stressful. Whenever I get reader emails on this topic, I try to reply straight away, but a good, detailed answer can take a long time to put together.
I feel good about being able to earn from my ideas and my words, but I feel great about being able to use my ideas and words to provide help for people who need it, who feel as though they have nowhere else to turn to. I only wish that I could do more to help, but in truth there’s only so much that I as a writer can do. Still, when you think about it, that blog has touched more people than my art has…
That doesn’t mean I’m ever going to ditch creating art, but it does mean that I can start to feel good about weeks when the writing takes over.
When the writing starts to feel like a machine that I’m tied to, as it does from time to time, then it’s time to step back and take a look at the machine that I personally created. It’s mine, I can do what I want with it, and it helps people.
It’s still creativity, just not in the marks-on-paper sense.
See? I feel a lot better now!
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