Getting Started

My friend reminded me recently that even professional creatives suffer from the anxiety of getting started.

The blank page is intimidating. I’m not the first one to ever write about this, or to give solutions.

But for me, it’s a topic worth reminding myself of because it happens so often that I forget that I’m doing it. It rears its head in the form of getting distracted, or making excuses with the auspices of research or letting it stew.

Before I know it, days or weeks go by, and I haven’t touched it. And then usually…it dies. It withers under the weight of having to exist, and to exist as a form good enough to the time I spent avoiding. It dies under the dark speculation in my head that nobody will like it.

So the blank remains blank.

But I think about my first actually decent car in my adulthood. It was pure white, and drove great. But one day in Minnesota, I was backing up from a driveway, and misjudged a low snow bank behind me. So I hit it, but it’s just snow so I didn’t think much of it. Up until I looked, and realized I cracked my bumper. I felt so terrible. I barely had it for months, and I already damaged it. Worst still, my parents had helped with money, so I felt like I disappointed them too.

But after I chilled out a bit. I realized it was fine. That as long I changed the oil, and checked the tires–the car was beastly. During the ten years I drove it, I took it around the country, banged it some more, and even had it try to survive LA traffic for two years. It was valuable to me, but no longer precious.

So that’s what I do now to new sketchbooks and new blank pages. I crash my pencil into it, and mark it up. It’s just paper. It’s fine. I just need to chill out.