I hate letting go of something I’ve made and releasing it into the wild. I hate not being able to hide it and cuddle it and keep it safe while I try to fix every tiny little thing that’s imperfect – which I know is a neverending job. I know if I allowed myself to do that, I’d never let anything out of my sight.
But damn, it’s scary.
My main background is in fiction, not film or any other type of visual media. I get to live in the little worlds my brain creates, I get to know and love (and hate) the characters that populate them. I grieve and laugh and do everything I can to make their story sound, on the page, the way it looks in my head. In many ways, it’s not so different.
I feel something not unlike panic every time I release one of these things – film or fiction – out into the world where it faces the risk of being shredded to tiny pieces by a voracious pack of wildly disappointed readers/viewers. That’s if anybody bothers to read/view in the first place, of course – there’s the risk that you put something out there and it just sits, all lonely, in a corner, and gathers dust.
Let’s face it, either scenario is fairly terrifying. So why keep doing it?
Because somebody, somewhere, if you can just get it to them, will love it – it’ll be exactly what they need.
Every so often I’ll get some email or comment or something out of nowhere, and it’ll be somebody telling me that something about something I made was the perfect something. From the teenager who was tentatively exploring her sexuality for the first time and found love and acceptance in my stories, to the Russian professor who was using something I wrote to combine computer science, english language, and a touch of ethical philosophy. Heck, even just somebody saying “I really enjoyed this” makes me grin for about a week, because in sharing what I made, I gave them some enjoyment. I’m sure a million people have a million theories on ratio here, but consider that for every person who manages to tell you something good about what you’ve made there are[insert number here]of people who have felt the same.
Come on – who doesn’t want a little piece of that? It feels really good to create something which people enjoy or find meaning in.
Because you love doing it, and that love can’t be contained and made to sit all quiet and unshared.
Is that self-indulgent? Maybe a little. Does that matter? Not a bit! We create because that thing within us stomps its feet and pouts and refuses to shut up until we do the thing we know we love to do.
I don’t know about you, but if I go for a while without letting my creative side out to play, I start to go a little loopy. I often get restless and frustrated without any help – add creative withdrawal and the things that accompany it, and the fact that I’m not doing the thing I love to do, and really, it’s just dumb. I need to do my thing.
And sharing it? Well why not? I deserve to stand tall and say “I made this. It may not be the best thing in the universe, but I worked hard, through the good bits and the bad bits, and I made this thing which didn’t exist before.”
Because art needs an outlet. It needs to be made, and once you’ve got it made, well why shouldn’t others at least have the chance to view it?
It’s not easy to make something. You know most people give up before they even try, and most of the rest give up halfway through. But you… You got all the way through. You worked your ass off for who knows how long, you got that thing done and finished and that is one hell of an achievement, right there. You know what you deserve to do? You deserve to jump up and down and shout about it to everyone you know. You deserve to be proud of what you’ve accomplished, and you do yourself a disservice if you then hide it away for nobody to ever see.
But it’s hard to let go.
It is. It’s hard to let go of the thing you worked so hard to make. It’s hard to see people be indifferent to it, or dislike it. It’s hard to take something you put your heart into and relinquish control. But it’s good to do so. It lets you be brave and proud, and it frees up your heart for the next thing.
And however good or bad this thing is, every time you let go and allow something new to begin, you get better at it. It never gets easy to let it go, but every new thing you relinquish will be better than the last, and you will be better for it.
This is for the people who hide their love of creating for fear of what people might think: Don’t. Stop doing that. Let it go, and let someone see.