This is a thought that's been rattling around in the back of my mind for the past couple of years and recently, with everything going on, it's been getting louder. I was in the studio this week turning it over and I realised it actually breaks down into three separate beliefs that keep trying to pull me out of a creative flow, so I wanted to talk through them and the things I have to keep reminding myself of to stay in it.

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The first one is guilt.‍

That feeling of being in a quiet studio making things while there's so much suffering happening elsewhere, like somehow that's self-indulgent. Whenever I catch myself hovering around that I have to drop it immediately because guilt is, as someone once put it, a landfill emotion. It's poison and I'm not interested in rationalising it or sitting with it. The truth I come back to is that we live in a multifaceted reality and there is never going to be a moment where only good things are happening in the world. Waiting for that moment to create doesn't make sense. And actually, creativity is the most significant contribution we can make right now, processing what's going on and sharing it.

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The second one is that feeling of being out of control.

For me that shows up as finding it hard to commit to projects or plan ahead because I don't know what the world is going to look like by the time the work is done. I had a pretty brutal experience with this during my first NFT launch where I spent five months building a solid body of work, had everything in place, and the week it went live the market crashed completely. That shook me more than I realised at the time and I think those feelings have been quietly bleeding into how I approach things since. The shift I've made is to focus on what actually happens inside me through the process, the resilience, the self-trust, the skills, because those are things I get to keep regardless of what the outcome does or doesn't do.

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The third one is more personal and something I've been working on for a while, this fear of bothering people.

Especially during launch periods when I'm more visible and putting work out into the world, there's this subconscious feeling that people have bigger things to deal with and here I am talking about art. What I keep coming back to is that all of that judgment is only happening in my own head and if anything the real problem is that people like me aren't taking up enough space. The people flooding the internet with fear and noise have zero hesitation about doing it and here we are, people who actually care deeply about what we're making, holding ourselves back from sharing things that are needed right now more than ever.

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So this week I'm leaning in. More time creating, more time thinking, more time making space for what feels good. If you've been feeling the same way, maybe this is the nudge to keep going.

Over the past couple of months I've been feeling this really strong creative energy, lots of ideas bubbling up and this real drive to make new work. The problem is my studio had become so cluttered over the past year that I'd literally run out of space to do anything.

Every time I came in I was in a time crunch and I always told myself the energy I had needed to go straight into the art, the tidying up could wait. And then one day it just couldn't anymore.

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There's something I used to believe about mess, that it was part of being creative. Back in uni I'd deliberately trash my studio space, scatter books and papers everywhere like chaos was proof that something real was happening in there.

It took me a while to realise that the mess wasn't fuelling anything, it was just a reflection of where my head was at. Once I started getting more organised internally I couldn't stand being in a cluttered space anymore.

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So I spent a day clearing everything out, then came back and painted the walls and floor white because I was sick of looking at all that old black paint. It's not perfect but I can see the floor, I can see the walls and I can actually work in there now.

The ideas that have been sitting on the edge of my mind for weeks are finally getting out next week and I can't wait!