Giving Yourself Permission to Create

How to give yourself to the blank page

For the longest time now, I’ve been thinking about how much pressure we put on ourselves to be great at everything. Whether it is the way we look or our jobs, we push ourselves to the limit, to burnout even. A side effect of capitalism is this push for perfection, to keep up with or be more than others, in order to seek that ever elusive happiness that we need so we can finally be content with who we are.

Is it any wonder then that we do not permit ourselves to spend time creating? To be creative is to accept the mess of who you are as a human being because the most beautiful things come from creative chaos. Which leads me to say this so called controversial point I regularly make when it comes to permitting oneself to create. You do not have to be “good” at art to make art. You are human and picking up a pen, pencil, paintbrush or instrument is in your bones, in your DNA. This is why even the smallest children first find their voice in paper and crayon. And they are joyous and proud of what they make until someone somewhere convinces them that actually they shouldn’t be making art until it is “good.”

One of the most difficult things the commodification of art has done to us is make us believe that we cannot be creative unless and until we are good by the standards of some shadowy gatekeeper sitting up in an ivory tower somewhere.

Who appointed these people as the Gods of Art that now decide which humans are worthy of creation? Why have they got so deep inside our heads that we no longer want to make art unless it fits their standards of ‘good’? And who decides what you get to do with a blank page or a sketchbook?

That’s right. Only you do.

I believe that every single human being in this world is capable of making art if they simply pick up a pencil, a pen or instrument. I think that is what we were made for. To process the world and turn it into art.

There is a poem by Nicanor Parra called “Young Poets” which goes like this:

Write as you will
In whatever style you like
Too much blood has run under the bridge
To go on believing
That only one road is right.

In poetry everything is permitted.

With only this condition of course,
You have to improve the blank page.

And the first time I read it, all I can think is, that’s some heavy pressure to put on a young poet – to improve a blank page. But as I grew my own creative practice, I realised that the improvement of a blank page doesn’t take much. It just takes you wanting to do something with that canvas. It takes embracing the gorgeous mess it is to be a human being and deciding, I will give this page my chaos. Let me unleash it somewhere.