Creation Before Clarity

The case for creating your way into knowing.

Back to shameless is about letting go of fear to step more fully into ourselves.

I see this as a homecoming, rather than a new frontier.

To me, authenticity feels childlike. It’s getting back to the place before outside influence made us malleable.

It’s the tutu over the jeans.

The juice-moustached belly laugh.

The “I wanna be a singer, a horse doctor, and have a house full of cats!”

It’s the untainted belief that we can do anything.

And sure, since childhood, we’ve refined our palates and probably don’t want a house that reeks of cat. But this isn’t the point. The point is that our shameless self isn’t afraid to express inner desire.

This fuller self speaks dreams into existence without self-deprecation or nervous laughter. It creates from a place of knowing. It’s uncensored, impractical and emboldened.

Somewhere along the way, that freedom learned to flinch.

As adults, we’re bogged down by unavoidable fear and responsibility. We have to toe a more delicate, thoughtful line than when we were three-foot and feral.

However, this doesn’t excuse us from pursuing the high-impact, exaggerated versions of ourselves.

Discounting our ability to be a reasonable adult and alchemize imagination is a fatal flaw.

Radicality, all-or-nothingness, and living out of a Westfalia are not required ingredients for our own becoming. But a focused commitment to creating is.

And we are more than qualified. We’ve kept things chugging along during some of the most unhinged times in modern existence.

We worked, travelled, made friends, ended relationships, found hobbies, bought shit, sold shit, fixed things, got lost, found inspiration, discovered, confronted, and occasionally, puked.

Don’t we owe it to ourselves to go after what we truly want?

If you’re like me, or are me, you’re probably thinking: un problemo, what if I don’t know what I want?

Sí Señor. That is a problem.

Not knowing is paralyzing, but it’s not an unrecoverable plague.

If we want to stretch ourselves to a place bigger than where we currently are, we must work at knowing.

And here’s how I think it can happen.

Unknowing gets shaken loose through creation.

We can meditate, listen, conjure, journal, horoscope, cardio, sunbathe, microdose, and talk to dead people. That’s a valid part of discovery.

But eventually, we have to put out.

Even without a clear end goal, we must follow the feeling and get stuff out into the world, switching from dreamer to doer.

Creation is challenging. But like exercise, cleaning, or returning a phone call (*cringe*), exponentially more effort goes into dreading it than doing it.

It’s the part that comes after creation—release—that is the true test. Catching our inner world, then sharing it, is work for the brave. The ego dead. The delusional.

Before publishing a post, I’ll spend hours on the draft, biding time in feigned indignation.

I’ll hum and haw about imagery being off.

I’ll fear that the piece has become too overfluffed, contrived, or worse: boring.

Then, before hitting publish, I’ll visualize “2 likes” stained across the digital letterhead in a public declaration of weakness.

The process of translating something from the inside to the outside is arduous. This is especially true when we care.

But it’s a requirement to have our public lives align with who we are.

If we don’t create, whether it be via writing, speaking, hosting, sewing, cooking, hacking, designing, playing, coding, or fucking, where does that energy go?

Like a forgotten tall can rolling around your trunk, you can ignore it for a while, but one day you’ll either open it or throw it away.

And if you choose to open it, a hose of stale piss may launch across the room.

It’s a flow of energy you’ve been carrying around for weeks, months—maybe years. It gets freed. There is release.

Clarity doesn’t precede action. Action releases pieces of the puzzle from the darkness. It reveals more of what we’re working with.

Naturally, as we age and open more cans, our compass draws closer to center.

Self-realization is a core meaning of life that is gifted back to most of us.

However, I don’t want to wait to be mauve-haired and tent-titted before I stop letting fear, or two likes, dictate who I am in the world.

I want to have energy, tooth enamel, and hip mobility when I start filling in the lion’s share of my puzzle.

And so, I create.

I create because I’m more afraid of what will happen if I don’t.