Uncertainty will ignite creativity, dont let your fears focus on depravity

Fear as google explains is an unpleasant emotion caused by the threat of danger, pain, or harm.

As a kid I was always afraid of being left alone , afraid of darkness . My childhood memories are filled of 100s of stories of  N number of things I was afraid of. Even my friends would make fun of my fears , some of them would even say : Is there anything you are not afraid of?

Like how during the summers when there would 8-10 hours of power cut , how I was  frightened I would be to sleep in darkness. For many years I would sleep keeping the lights on in my bedroom because I was afraid that I would suffocate. Today I can’t sleep with lights on, because I know there is always light in our heart and minds .

This one vivid memory that I have is I would be dreaded to sit in art classes because the first thing they would teach in the class would be to draw a tree. The ones where you make a cloud looking thing on two parallel lines. Every time my teacher would see the tree I drew, she would say “You know, you really need to learn how to draw a tree,”. That made me feel that I would never be able to draw anything again. I would come crying out the class and would tell my mother I won’t go for the next class, but she would tell me next class would be better than this one.  Years later, I won a state level art competition .

I had associated a thread of fear with everything in my life, like this one time when I was a part of a group picnic in school and we went to a river bank in a nearby village. Everything was fun and everyone was enjoying and suddenly I lost 4 of my class mates to drowning. I saw them being pulled out of the water and in matter of minutes my friends who were playing alongside me were no more. Since then I have been afraid of water, every time I see a lake , sea or river I just freeze. It is almost 15 years since this happened but even today when I am writing about the incident I have tears in my eyes. For months, I could not sit in the classroom and looking at the empty desks , I knew I would not meet my best friends anymore. Since then, I have limited my friends circle because I fear I might lose my loved ones again. However I have made some of the most closest friends for whom I can go to any length to protect them. Fear of losing has given me strength to protect my relationships.

We are afraid to be wrong. We are afraid to make a mistake. We’re afraid of not being perfect. We’re afraid of looking stupid and being laughed at or being rejected. There are a million scary things out there and inside us that make us say to ourselves, “pursue creativity? I don’t think so.”

So many things get erased from us, and I mean really erased early on, not only because of what other people say, but what we feel about what they say.
We are pigeonholed so early in our lives that many of our talents have gone untapped and leave us yearning, wondering what we are missing. As we grow up, we internalize those judgments people made about us and we become very good at crushing our own creative aspirations. We become our own most vicious critics. How do we create when a part of us is choking that impulse?

I have missed out on so many life changing experiences because I just did not want to venture into that fearful feeling of not knowing how to come out if uncertainty strikes. Like feeling the cool water when you stand on the water soaked sand on a sea beach. Darkness does not always mean an unseen ghost emerging from the underneath of your bed but it might also mean the brightness of stars on the horizon of dark sky.

When uncertainty strikes believe it or not, your mind works in unimaginable ways, but we mostly ignore the creative things the mind tells us to do. We primarily focus on the fear. Creativity thrives on uncertainty. If we always knew the outcome of our creative endeavours we would probably be too bored to complete them. Uncertainty, curiosity, stumbling one foot after the other, we create our own unique yellow brick road of imagination. We can live gracefully with uncertainty when we stay connected to the part of ourselves that gets joy from the act of creation, rather than always looking to what its product is going to be.

  

Here is what I learnt : Don’t try to create and analyse at the same time. They’re different processes. 

To stay with your creative journey, you should celebrate your quirks, your idiosyncrasies, your failures , your fears , your unique and weird ways of perceiving and expressing. They are your staunchest defenders against the destructive aspects of self-judgment. They are the qualities that make your individual creativity unlike any other.

Fear has the power to stop us daily.. But, instead of acknowledging our fears, which feels defeating, we tend to ignore them. We stick to the way things are because so far, it’s served us well—we haven’t been hurt or disappointed in the ways we’re afraid to be. But ask yourself, ‘Do I feel whole? Have I experienced the entire spectrum of human emotion? Has my work reflected everything I’ve experienced? Can I say that I’ve tried my hardest?’

When I feel myself cowering under the weight of what scares me, I consider this: So much of my creativity has yet to unfold. There are innumerable things that haven’t happened yet—in fact, so many things haven’t been given the chance to happen because I am afraid.

There is no beauty in perfection. There is beauty in challenge, adversity, failure. There is beauty in rejection and in carrying large pain, knowing you have the ability to stand with it within you. The beauty is in the rising—in creating strength and determination from the places where fear lives.

Don’t try to be fearless because being truly fearless either means a full blown psychopath or a reckless 3 year old ( as my sweet heart niece-Katie). And I don’t think we aspire to be either of those things.

Instead think fear and creativity have a symbiotic relationship. Don’t try to kill your fear , because when you kill your fear you kill your creativity as well. Because creativity sparkles in uncertainty, the same ground where fear germinates. Construct a mental space and consciously tell your fear and creativity that there is place for both of you in the uncertain journey . Tell your fears that you don’t get to select the how the journey will be and remind your creativity that there is nothing to panic because you do have a seat belt around you.

Take control of your fears and cushion your creativity, you have the choice to turn your fears into your most beautiful creative outcomes of your life. don’t let your fears take control of your life….