There is a very annoying human tendency, when looking back on one's life, to mistake retrospect for negligence. "I should have known better" implies that knowledge was available and I simply failed to use it. But that knowledge lived beyond an experience I hadn't had yet — and experiences, frustratingly, require living through them. Without the benefit of hindsight. As if it were one's first rodeo.
I am remarkably hard on my past self for being exactly as unformed as she was supposed to be. Which is, when I think about it, like scolding a caterpillar for not being able to fly like a butterfly yet. Rude, frankly.
A creative path doesn't come with a map with steps to follow, credentials to collect, or predetermined destinations at which to arrive. When I go off-trail, which is often, I rely on instinct, nerve, and the willingness to be wrong in surprisingly spectacular ways. My mistakes aren't the mistakes of someone who ignored the instructions. They're the mistakes of someone writing the instructions as she goes, while riding by the seat of her pants — which, incidentally, makes it really hard to write.
I don't think this makes me brave. It means, more accurately, that not-knowing is less scary than not-trying. The real risk of not-trying is the slow forfeiture of my own curiosity — the gradual replacement of my future self with a more manageable, less embarrassing, thoroughly unfulfilled impostor. And honestly? That impostor is exhausting.
Creativity asks: do I have the willingness to stay in the not-knowing long enough for something new to emerge? The moment I already know the answer — when the solution is settled, resolved, and prepackaged — the creative act is over before it even begins. I'm not making anything. I'm reproducing something. Which is fine for manufacturing, and a cruel death for art.
Remaining genuinely open requires accepting that I don't control the outcome, the work might take me somewhere uncomfortable, and I might discover something that complicates everything I thought I understood. Conformity finds this deeply upsetting. Conformity shows up with a clipboard, a list of acceptable goals, and a fake smile that says…Ummmm, no.
Conformity is where curiosity goes to die. And for that, we should hold a candlelight vigil.
Conformity hands me the "correct" answers in advance. It mistakes familiarity for truth. Which does something most unfortunate: it makes the world smaller than it actually is. This is the creative equivalent of someone scanning the whole wide West and deciding, You know? A fence would really tie this landscape together.
I have stood in the wreckage of things that didn't work and turned that retrospective clarity into a weapon against myself. But I understand now: not-knowing is not a failure of preparation. It is the condition of being fully open, curious, and genuinely alive to the work. That condition deserves better than the relentless internal audit I've been running. It deserves honor — for sitting in the discomfort of what only the experience could reveal.
The sensitivity that makes me good at my work is the same quality that makes me a brutal self-auditor. I can turn on myself with extraordinary precision. That particular loop of self-cruelty is so common it gets mistaken for wisdom. I’m saying, Ummmm, no to that. Not to offer comfort exactly, but to offer a more accurate story.
Creativity is not a specialty skill issued exclusively to artists and then withheld from everyone else. It is a fundamental human capacity — as universal as curiosity and as necessary as breath. It lives in every sector and every discipline. And whether it produces a silver bracelet, a scientific breakthrough, or an innovative business model — it expands the world.
And for that, we deserve a Participation Trophy.
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