Last Updated on 19 August 2025 by Colette
I watched a video a couple of weeks ago which really struck a chord. In this video, James talked about how in getting older, he had lost some of the naivety in his creativity – that perhaps he now overthinks the worth and value of a piece of work – Will it be good enough? Will the outcome be worth the hassle? And I really felt that.
When I first started writing, I wrote about whatever I wanted – words spilled out of me and I shared them. But as time has gone on – and what a lot of time it has been – I have stifled those words and that creativity with thoughts of, ‘you can’t write that, it’s not your story to tell‘ (generally true), ‘there’s no point writing that, someone else has probably already done it better‘ (also perhaps true but they didn’t do it with my eyes / experience / words) or ‘why would anybody be interested in reading that anyway?’. But perhaps that’s not the point, perhaps I need to write because the words are there and they need to come out and that whether you or anybody else reads those words is by the by.
I used to write in my head while I was in the shower, driving or when I was trying to get to sleep – many an article was written (just like this one) on my phone, late at night when I should be asleep but the words began to form and I knew if I didn’t write them down they’d be lost. Wasted.
I never saw myself as a creative person until I learned I could write – to me creativity was about drawing and painting – and believe me I’m utterly useless at that. What I learned when I started sharing my thoughts is that actually I love writing, I also love taking photos and making videos but analytics, algorithms and AI have a stolen the joy somewhere along the way – along with of course the pressure I put on myself to always do better – to create better videos, to take better photos, to write better content . . . which, as James says in his video, actually stops me from doing it at all. Perhaps it is time to get back some of that fearlessness and create for the sake of creating – not because it’s my job or because I feel I should, but because it’s what I want to do and it’s good for me.
So here I am, lying in bed at midnight, wishing once again that we had invested in an air conditioning unit this summer, and letting the words flow without even really thinking about it – and it’s bloody lush.
Next time the words start to form at an inconvenient time, I am making a promise to myself (and you if you care) that I will work with them and write them down instead of letting them drift off, ignored.
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