Creativity is Just Fear in a Better Outfit
Hi, my name is Travis and I am a recovering creative...
To be creative is to be uncomfortable. Or to grow a compassionate affinity towards the things that make us uncomfortable. Things that make us doubt ourselves. Things that, without further observation, might otherwise convince us to hide behind the curtain of fear, for hiding is better than being exposed, than being imperfect or feeling that we are half of the people we should be before doing the things we dream about.
Every time I send this newsletter, I am a bit uncomfortable. Each essay is incomplete, imperfect, not exactly what I want it to be. It could be shorter, longer, more concise, more abstract, more descriptive, less personal, more morally succinct. And yet, I send it out, because anything and everything could be more or less of something, and there are other things to do.
Launching the newsletter itself was something I feared a couple years back. I thought: What if my writing sucks? Who cares what I have to say? What will I even write about (the last thought still appears, at times, like the familiar shape of a cumulus cloud, the kind we cooked up animals from as children, especially in the weeks where I postpone writing the newsletter till the night before). In what some of my friends would label “typical Aquarius fashion,” I made a goliath sized format for the newsletter, injecting it with so many promises and ideas that it could not be a failure, for something so large could never possibly fail, including weekly playlists, editorial reviews, interviews and personal essays. Needless to say, the goliath format shed a few pounds, then a few more, and finally arrived at something I enjoyed creating: a simple essay every two weeks.
I started it, it transformed—at times appearing completely different than I had intended—and now it is no longer scary.
If I dive back through the pages of my life, there is a common theme threaded between the chapters. Behind every great decision I’ve made, both fear and wonder were present: deciding to pursue a “creative career” after nothing but four years of labs and research papers, moving to New York without a plan, creating a home in a foreign country. Wonder nests inside fear like the center of an unfurled blossom, waiting to give life, waiting to spore seeds. First comes one, then comes the other.
It is not just the great decisions, but the small ones, too: opening a blank page, starting therapy, recharging the batteries of a camera that had not been touched in a decade. In doing the things that scare us, we are actively being—and becoming—people that make us proud. People who create, people who grow, people who discover what exists beyond the expectations of our everyday lives. In avoiding discomfort, we remain safe, sealed off, immune to the prickled spines of cringe that crawl around any act of creativity or risk, intimidating us with our own insecurities, the ones that keep our dreams hidden in a safe, the ones that sound like: Am I any good? This sucks, this is not perfect! I am not there yet.
The funny thing about those voices is that they only appear when we are becoming, when we are getting there (which, of course, often ends up being no different than here, in that the condition of the artist seems to be a never-ending process of becoming).
It is easier to think “I am not there yet because I have not tried” than to think “I am not there yet because I am learning.” Creativity’s most seductive opponent is the promise of inaction: as long as we have not tried, we remain ripe with unused potential. As long as we wait a little bit more, we can continue believing that we will be the best (once we try), that life will happen to us, that we might become the best versions of ourselves immediately, an overnight story, instead of sludging through the reality of what it means to tackle a dream: an artform, a language, a relationship, a career, a move.
There is a saying that the artist is destined to remain unfulfilled, incomplete, for an artist’s tastes—what they deem beautiful, perfect and aspire towards—will always outpace their ability to create. Many joke that this is why some artists become critics. It is easier to say what is good and bad than to take the good and bad and mold it into something of our own, something that may be too much bad and not enough good, something that could always be better.
My hope, however, is that the artist can alter that destiny, that instead of viewing ourselves (and our work) as incomplete, we can accept ourselves as we are, the way we admire and cheer on plants that sprout new leaves, celebrating the process of becoming itself and all of the discomfort it requires.
This period of my life is uncomfortable. Every time I sit down to write, I am uncomfortable. Every time I consider what the next month will look like, I am uncomfortable. Every time I make a content plan or script an idea for a video, I am uncomfortable. I feel fraudulent, I feel silly, I feel dumb. And I am not only learning to see through those feelings, but to be proud of them. To notice that they are cues that I am headed in the right direction.
So here I am, sharing something else that makes me uncomfortable: I am learning to make vlogs. Even writing that sentence makes me cringe, because there are so many judgements rooted within the word “vlog” (or “content”). People associate content, vlogs, YouTube, and any form of the medium as premature, childlike, a hobby-esque form of creativity that pales in comparison to a feature film. Or maybe that is my own voice, the artist’s voice, that thinks something needs to be perfect and pickled with accolades in order to be taken seriously.
On my thirtieth birthday, I decided to film myself. To make a vlog. In between the giddy joy of a child playing with leggos, I felt the insecurity of a teenager doing the same thing. It was frustrating and uncomfortable and awkward, playing with a tripod for the first time and using settings on my ten year old camera that I never knew existed. I wondered if I was wasting my time, then shook off the thought, for I had not felt as excited about making anything since I was in college, since I used to stitch together over-saturated clips of myself and my friends in an attempt to recreate the aesthetic of the cinematographers I loved most. At some point, I stopped attempting because I thought I was too far behind. I was self-conscious about what people would think in the setting of an adult conversation (what do you do? I’m a YouTuber). I moved onto other forms of creativity, forms that seemed more legitimate (what do you do? I’m a copywriter), as well as necessary, according to my rent. So I picked up the marketing hat and dropped the creator hat.
Now I am putting the hat back on. Now I am trying on many different hats, realizing that hats are meant to be worn, not identified with.
It took me four years to be able to say “I am writing a book,” many more to say “I am a writer.” Recently, at a gallery opening in the city, a new friend presumed that writing was my profession, my role, as they came across my Substack prior to our meetcute, and I responded: No, kind of. And then I was like: Wait, yes, I am a writer. Despite spending the majority of my day job writing copy, spending a few hours each week writing this newsletter and a few hours more working on my book, I feel uncomfortable claiming any creative title, for there is, still, a flame of insecurity that flickers in my chest.
The thought that too easily consumes the creative person is: Who cares? Who am I to do this? Why would I film my life, write about my life or share anything I make in the first place?
The more I give into my creativity, however, the more I give it the space to breathe, removing the chokeholds of what kind of artist I should be—of what an artist is in the first place—and in doing so realize that being a creator is about being in the process of creation, the relationship we have with words or colors, clips or sounds, allowing them to channel through us like a ray of sun so that our experiences on this planet might synthesize into something new.
Of course, what every person wants is to find a community through the things they do. The human dream is to belong, to find people that think like them. To help other people feel seen, heard and held, especially if we are artists, because if we are artists, there is no doubt that we have felt unseen, unheard and not held enough. So we create in an attempt to do all three for each other.
I have dreams of publishing my book and curating little gatherings in bright spaces, encouraging people to share their voices, to know each other and celebrate each other. I have dreams of being able to translate the feelings that move across my heart and mind through images and sounds. I have dreams of evolving this newsletter into something more communal, something less “I publish, you read.” The most honest dream of all, though, is that I dream of making magic, to materialize all of the things we experience into something that reminds us to be proud—of our friends, our neighbors, our mothers, our fathers, the people we know and the world we live in, despite peoples’ capacity to destroy it.
After filming or writing something, I can still think: No one is going to watch this. No one is going to read this. Those thoughts, however, are near translucent, because the dream is not to be read or watched. The dream is to be ourselves: human beings, becoming and changing and doing the only thing that we actually do: be, eternally incomplete (and therefore as complete as we'll ever be), at once fractured and whole, cringe and proud, wrong and right, a work of perpetual creation.
I still have a voice of judgement in my head that labels things as good or bad, that reads a poem TikTok and thinks: This is the worst thing I have ever read. Though I may still agree with that voice, another voice appeared, too, that thinks: That person is creating. They are sharing. They are making something, despite all of the doubts and insecurities we download at a young age, some more than others, some less than others, that discrepancy a design of colonialism, speaking to why most creative fields lack ethnic, gender and socioeconomic diversity, why there are too few creators who are queer or BIPOC, why most of the shitty poems I see online are from cis, white men.
Regardless of what it is we create, regardless of whether or not we share it, I think it is important to give ourselves the permission to do so—especially if we feel scared. Especially if we were taught to be uncomfortable, if we grew up in a society where the artists we read, watched or listened to did not look like us, walk like us or think like us. In my opinion, we deserve it the most. We need it the most, to look fear in the eye and call it for what it is: a sign that we are moving in the right direction. ☷
Thanks for reading Sleepover! In the spirit of accessibility, this newsletter will always be offered for free. Please consider a paid subscription if you’d like to support the things I create—with and beyond this project.
With love,
Your favorite capybara ☼ AKA Travis Zane
Join the party on: Instagram 🪩 TikTok 🪩 YouTube 🪩 Bluesky 🪩 X 🪩 Website
