Week 3+4 of creative work

Or the best Influencers' apology you'll ever see 😜

Dear readers,

I admit it. Yes, I did not publish anything in the past 2 weeks. Nor did I drive any project to completion. This extreme procrastination led to a huge public image failure and humiliation 😵‍💫. But I've also learned a few things:

Fear kicking in

After the first week, it was so scary to create.

I started to judge my creative work so harshly that I subconsciously made decisions to not have time to create. Each night, even if I climbed to bed early, I stayed on my phone until 2 am, so I could excuse myself from 1-hour creative work over the health concern of adequate sleep. Each morning, even if I had time, I do random things long enough so that by 10 am, I "better working now or get fired." It took me a week to realize this pattern.

When I choreographed this dance, I was so concerned that my dance would look like another commercial dance with no personality. I couldn't pull out a structure of what I wanted to talk about when I wrote.

Yet, my head was beaming with ideas. The fact that I can't execute them makes me even more frustrated. New York streets are filled with creativity, which inspires me, but also felt like a scolding over my inadequacy.

But...

..the most crucial question is: Who put me through all those sufferings? Me. I did it.

Why did I do it?

Part of the reason I rushed my work is for it to be good enough for commercial standards asap because, ideally, I could make a living doing fun projects. But I spend 8 hours daily working on a corporate job for financial security. I wanted to rush myself as much as I could to "escape" from that.

Another reason is my tendency to only want to do something if I'm good at it. I was good at school, which primes me to things that give me external validation asap. Doing creative work, this new domain, wasn't one of them.

Crawling out of it

However, after climbing through the peak of self-doubt and scrutiny while trying to still create to fulfill a public promise, I've learned a few things.

 1. At this point, it doesn't matter much about the technicality; more about expressing myself.

I'm reading Starting Point, an autobiography by Hayao Miyazaki, the creator of Ghibli movies. I've always felt enchanted watching Ghibli movies, awed by the level of attention to detail, the spirit of each character, and how slow and subtle the meaning is. But when he spoke about his starting point, one quote stood out to me:

Don't concern too much with technicality [..] It all starts with having something that you want to express […] Inspired by that trigger, what rushed forth from inside you is the world you have already drawn inside yourself, the many landscapes you have stored up, the thoughts and feelings that seek expression.

This is very true. I've found it easiest to create when I know exactly what I want to convey - an emotion. When making the comic for my friend Phuong, I clearly sensed how the pain inside me felt at the time. Drawing it was therapeutic because it was precisely the "feelings that seek expression" that Miyazaki talked about.

When I didn't have anything to say, like when trying to create a choreography based on random objects, dancing became really painful. I became focused on making something "cool" instead of having anything to say. Though I think eventually it will become a good exercise to just be silly and practice imagination with imagery and body shapes, at this point, it cripples me more than pulling my creativity forwards.

It also reflects on a recent dance class I attended by my favorite dancer in NYC, sirgregg. Many technical dancers were in the studio, but something about his performance pulled my entire presence in. After the class, he told us that despite the choreography being someone else's, we should draw something from ourselves, so that when we dance, we no longer exist within the four walls of the studio. "We're supposed to dance from another world." He was really pulling the viewers to his inner world, which captivated us.

Besides, it makes more sense to seek expression through creativity than just being creative. Art is not the only revenue to be creative. You can be creative with almost anything you care about. And I've felt the most alive while making things from the heart.

2. What I consider basic could be new to someone.

Another very heartfelt project was a recent collaboration with my friend Yufei. We picked the same poem and drew a 4-panel comic from it. I was concerned my interpretation was too literal, but Yufei saw many new things, which was encouraging. Explaining my concepts to her also made me realize that I'm seeking an expression for my homesickness, which words have failed. When I come from this specific angle, it's hard to replicate, aka be basic.

3. I don't need to be focused yet.

I was so concerned with being unfocused. There are simply TOO many things I'm committing myself to - designing/drawing, writing, dancing, martial arts, gardening, and coding. I was afraid I would run out of time before I could master a craft, to feel entirely in control of it, which requires more focus than range.

However, going to martial arts classes teaches me the physics of the body, which is translatable to dancing. I could rotate my hips and change gravity during choreography the way I wasn't before. Drawing and design give me a better sense of shapes and visuals, a key element in dance. Drawing also taught me to be more observant because I take mental snapshots of figures and humans on the street for inspiration, which serves me well in martial arts class. While my improvement is slow and spread across disciplines, each improvement feeds into another. I believe in their eventual compounding effects. 

So here I am, redirecting myself with 3 more principles:

• Create from the heart

• Whenever I'm worried I'm too basic, remember that whatever comes from my heart can't be basic.

• It's okay I'm not a master at anything right now.

Finally, I recognize that I've lost your trust in the promise from Re-manifesto of this blog. And like my mom said, "It takes $30,000 to buy trust, but you could only sell it for $3," I did sell your trust for $3 by slacking off. But I'm determined to re-earn your faith, much like how I re-earned my friend, Aniket's. I promised to watch 2 seasons of Never Have I Ever with him and failed to wait for him both times. So when I told him to watch Heart Stopper with me, he barely trusted me but gave me a chance to prove myself again. I did it. I hope you give me another chance and still care to keep me accountable for this.

P/s: I'm just being extra dramatic so I can use this drama as a motivation to overcome my fears.

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This is the week #4 update of my daily creative challenge, as outlined in the Re-manifesto of this blog. I’m inspired by MỞ - Mơ và Hỏi’s course, Writing On The Net 2 (#wotn2), and all my friends who write and create consistently!