Blogging & Creativity

Hello, friends.

I've been "blogging" for two years. I wrote my first blog post on a whim of creativity and the need to share how I was feeling, and I remember receiving positive feedback from my close friends and family. It was nice.

Nowadays, I mostly just bottle up whatever latest and greatest topic I feel like I could write about. None of my past posts have really ever gotten much attention. One, because I really don't write that often, and two, when I do publish a post, it's usually a form of me complaining slash talking about how much the human race needs Jesus. (Which quite frankly, are not popular topics.)

But here's the thing: I didn't start blogging to become famous, get noticed or shared or talked about by other huge blogs. The reason I started writing and sharing is because I wanted to write and to share. I have a passion for writing about things that matter to me, and I wanted a place to be able to share those things.

Over the past several months, I've felt so incredibly both encouraged and discouraged, really about life in general, but mostly just in the context of creativity. I realized the cold hard truth: that no matter how good I am at photography, someone else is always better at it than I am. That applies to art as well. There will always be a better hand letterer than me out there. There will always be a better watercolor artist out there. There will always be someone better at sketching celebrities' faces out there. The list goes on and on and on and on.

So this begs the question: what's my goal? Is my goal to be the best? No. It's not, and I really have to remind myself of that. Because most of the time it feels like it is. I want to push and challenge and motivate myself to create, but if my goal is to be the best, then I will fail. Because it's unachievable.

Everyone has a personal style of creativity, and I want mine to show. Creativity isn't about being the best, it's about creating based on how you feel. I don't want to copy someone else's work. I want to strive to better my own talents, and be honest about where I am and how I feel. I think that once I can consistently do that in every aspect of my creative life, the need to be the best will fade.