Frustrated with Art: Rediscovering Your Passion and Reason for Creating

I'm always learning from everyday adventures. Tune in to hear me talk about my frustrating experience skiing for the first time, and what lessons I learned about my creativity. Hopefully, it helps you be patient with your creativity and reignites your passion for your craft.

Transcript

Raya: 0:01

Hey, y'all welcome back to sheer creativity. The podcast about creatives for creatives. I'm your host Laraya. And it's just me today. Normally I have an interview set up, but I want to make this more of a performance slash interviews slash conversation slash advice. I mean, we just doing it all over here, so you're going to hear me perform some poetry. You're going to hear others perform. You're going to hear advice, different stories that I want to share relating to creativity. So. It's going to be a little bit of everything, and I'm really excited about the different conversations I have lined up. And today, if you have already read the title, I'm frustrated with my art and I want to share. So before I get into the crux of this podcast, I want to talk about my ski trip in the mountains of Virginia. So, I recently went into the mountains for a girl's trip and we're calling it our first annual trip so I'm going to do it again and hopefully this time I try a few more things, but. Back to the story. It's me. My oldest sister. My aunt, my aunt's best friend and my cousin. And we, I mean, we got this nice chalet of in the mountains, this nice house. These big gorgeous windows. It's just a gorgeous time. And we're planning to go snow tubing. If you don't know what snow tubing is, it's you literally just sit in a tube and they push you down a hill of snow, which was great. That was the highlight of my trip. Um, but we also tried skiing. And. Let me just say this. I am the type of person who will try anything once, but once I figure out that is not my gift, once I figure out that I am not immediately good at something, I don't like it and I don't want to do it anymore. And I'm not the type to ruin everybody else's fun who still wants to do it, but I'm okay with going to sit down. And maybe that's like a party pooper, which is something I try so hard not to do, And I'm learning that I can be frustrated with things very early on which is something that I'm working on. So, but at this point in the story, I still have the mindset that if I find out that I'm not good at something. I'm probably not going to be happy to do it. Picture this. We're on our ski trip and this is the day that we're going to go skiing. We go, we rent these heavy boots. I mean, those boots have to be like eight pounds. So we go out there, we got our snow suits on. We rent the skis and the little sticks that you ski with. And we're going out onto the snow. And we put the skis on, you have to step into the skis so that the boots will lock into it. So we do that. And we're just out here trying stuff like this is before anybody gets any lessons. I mean, we just out here. Just trying to figure things out. And we're struggling like it is really embarrassing. In my mind, people are looking at me crazy but I'm pretty sure that that's just in my mind. We fall a couple of times. We're trying to gain our balance. We're trying to figure out how to get to the top of the hill and go down the hill. We're trying to figure out how to stop and it's a whole ordeal. While it looks like everybody else is progressing in learning how to do this, I am going nowhere. Everyone else that I came skiing with has already left me behind it at this point. So I am by myself and I'm sticking my sticks in the ground and I'm trying to use my upper body strength to get me to where I need to go to where everybody else is and let me be clear. I have zero upper body strength. My arms are noodles. So i'm really not going anywhere. I keep going backwards and there's like people behind me. So in order to not hit them, I have to fall. And falling hurts. So my hip is hurting. And I just, I just say, you know what? This, this may not be for me. I just take the skis off. And I mean, there's little kids, like seven year old showing me up. They, they know how to control themselves. They know how to stop. We're literally out here falling to stop. And at a certain point. I was like, this is for the birds and I'll, y'all have y'all fun. But I'll wait for y'all. So I took those skis off and I, and I waited for them and I was so extremely frustrated that I was not able to do this. And I fell three times and my hip has not been the same sense. So I tell that story because as I was sitting down and I was contemplating why I'm out here freezing with eight pound shoes on, I started to see the parallel between my skiing experience and my creative experience currently. So when it comes to my writing, this podcast or any other creative avenues that I operate in, I have really been battling with my art to the point where I just give up entirely. And for me personally, it's been a few different things that I've encountered recently. The first one is that writing used to be very easy for me. And that's not to say that easy means it's good. I am by no means saying that everything that I write comes out the way that I want it to be on the first try. And what I mean is that the flow is easier. It means that I can get into the groove of things, the groove of writing particularly easy and there's not much that I have to do in order to trigger the creative energy that I need. I've always been a writer. That's something I've been able to do with ease and I love it. I love poetry. I love words. And it feels really frustrating to not be able to create on the caliber that I'm used to and with the ease that I'm used to. And I'm also encountering this feeling of reading my work and being like is this an accurate depiction of how I feel right now and who I am at this moment in my life. So for anyone who hasn't read any of my work on Instagram. Or my book words from a wanderer available on Amazon. Go ahead and cop that. Um, My style of creation is what I would call nomadic in a sense and also rooted in self discovery and that's always been my lane because in my adolescence and even sometimes in adulthood, I really struggle with finding my authenticity and loving the person I am without feeling the need to change who I am. And I still find that lane to be important especially in this social media age. However, I'm feeling like I'm outgrowing that type of content for myself. Whether that means I'm outgrowing my usual terminology. My usual metaphors. My vocabulary. Like, I feel like I'm just, I'm hitting a plateau. When it comes to writing within this specific niche. And maybe there's a higher level of growth that needs to happen. Maybe I need to dig deeper into what self discovery means as an adult. I'm not really sure. But that's been difficult to navigate because when I look at works I've done in my book or even prior to my book on Instagram and. and what I've been able to create now, it feels like such a disconnect. Like who, who is this? Who is this girl? Did she even feel the same? Like is this 19 year old Laraya? Is that why 23 year-old Laraya can't relate to her? And life in general is the third reason why creation has been very hard for me recently because a lot of the time, I'm working or I'm at home exhausted from work. And even on weekends, I can kind of be a recluse. Like I give just a little bit boo Radley. So I, I haven't been able to get out and really experience life. If your life is constantly I wake up. I go to work. I come home. There. There may be a disconnect. There may be a lack of spark, of creative spark, creative energy there because I'm not doing anything to nurture it. So with that being said, let's go back to the ski trip where Laraya is struggling and decides i'm just not gone do it. I had sat down for about maybe 20, 25 minutes. And I got a text from my sister. Told me to, um, meet all of them at this one spot and I walked over to them. And, you know, they were sitting down. And looking very tired because you know, skiing is no easy feat. They saw me walking up and my aunt said, You know, we've been struggling with this too. You know, we're, we're not good at this. This is not one of our gifts. But we're doing it. But we're out here. You see that were muddy because apparently they found some mud in the snow and they've been falling. They've been trying to get this, this skiing down. And it's been hard. But they did it. And at first, when I heard that, I was like, okay. But there's a lot of truth to that. And I was thinking what if we approached our art like that to the point where we still pursue it. We still do it, even if it's the hottest of messes. It doesn't have to stay that way. You know, do it, even if it's ineffective. We're doing it. We didn't give up on it, you know? So, what does not giving up on your art look like? I imagine that it looks like getting up and doing something. You know, even going on this ski trip was a break from the norm for me. It's a break from clocking in and it was a chance to do different things that I've never done before. Like, I've never been inside of a cave or a cavern before, which was something that I did. It's really cool how this beautiful place exists beneath the ground. Being able to get up and go out and experience life. That will spark your creativity and I think when some people say that you have to get up and experience life. They think that you have to go hop on a plane and traveled to a different country and all this other stuff and a lot of that is really social media's fault. We believe that going out and experiencing life has to be on this very large scale. And it doesn't have to be. And especially sometimes your bank account says you are not going anywhere. Sometimes your bank account will be like, no. There's so many things that you can do that don't involve a whole bunch of money and it doesn't involve a whole bunch of effort. Go out and walk somewhere. Notice the trees. Notice leaves, notice nature. Go to a different restaurant that you don't usually frequent, try different foods, go around different people. Sometimes going out and experiencing life. We'll trigger new thoughts. New understandings about the world. New ways to harness that creative energy that you have in order to hone in on what you want. To be your next focus, your next muse. Another thing that I would say would help you if you're feeling frustrated with your craft right now. In order to produce good work. You have to be taking in good work. And for writers, I would usually say that in order to write good work, you have to read good work. Now I used to be such an avid reader when I was going up and college just sucked the joy out of reading for me. And I'm still trying to get that back. What if you're like a slam poet? Watch poets on YouTube. Notice their inflection, notice the words that they use. Notice what their topic is. And see if that relates to you. Now, don't go out here stealing people's stuff. But allow them to help you get the gears rolling. I would say if you're a creative director, study some photographs. If you're a writer. Find some authors that you really enjoy their work. And find out what makes them so influential to you. Many successful writers are actually dedicated readers. Or other people who are within a creative background are watchers of the content that they want to create. So figure out, how in watching someone else's content, how that translates to you in your authenticity. And my last point, I ain't going to keep you all long. My last point if you are frustrated with the art that you are creating is time. Allow yourself, time to evolve as a person because as you evolve as a person, you also evolve as a creative. I am a firm believer that we live in such a microwave, Amazon Prime society that we don't really sit with change anymore. And it's actually healthy to change. It's actually healthy to sit in change and allow yourself to morph into a a stronger person, a person with different values, a person that has grown. And your life is literally changing day to day. So why wouldn't you think that your work changes? Your work will change with you day to day. And really. It's kind of like an album. An album and a book. It's a set piece of content that is you at this time, this specific time in your life. And that's why a lot of people as they record more, as they write more. If they change. So you can't expect the work to be the same. You need time to focus on what's important to you in this very moment because it may change a year from now. So, what is it right now? Sit with that. You may not understand it. Right now in this moment. So you have to sit with it. You have to start writing it out and it may look ugly. It may sound weird. It may not jive with you automatically. Sit with it. But if you don't sit with it, if you don't try to even interact with it then you end up like me on a ski trip, sitting down wondering why you're out there, wondering what your purpose is. I want you guys to take the advice of my, my very intelligent aunt. Just do it. And really, she sounds like Nike too. So just do it. In the meantime when you're figuring it out and you're frustrated and you don't know what you're doing, just do it. Even if it's bad. Just do it. By the end of the day, my aunt, my sister, my cousin, and my aunt's best friend. They were able to stand up on their own and to have some ability to stop themselves other than falling. So by the end of the day, they made progress. And you will make progress too. You will figure out what it is that you want to create. So I hope that you enjoyed this conversation. And I hope that you tune in next week for more conversations, more interviews, of course. But I want to thank you guys for even hearing out this kind of impromptu episode. I hope you're excited about what I have next. Make sure you're following Sheer Creativity on Instagram. You can follow us on Facebook as well. The handle will always be sheer creativity. If you have some time definitely rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening from and I will see you guys later.