For the past two weeks I’ve embarked on a self-designed, self-directed creative trek as part of Kening Zhu’s labyrinth community. A trek is similar to the popular concept of a “challenge”, but less “this is my goal, and I have to do it every day no matter what” and more “this is my intention, and I will move with life’s detours along this path”.

I chose to embark on a writing practice, as a way to ground my creativity and my swirling thoughts. I ended up using my voice in unexpected ways, and beginning a body of work that feels imperfect but beautiful.

What I did

The practice: write something and publish it to my website.

Guiding intention: allowing myself to share my messy, half-formed, potentially useless, potentially controversial thoughts, in public.

Rhythm: daily, but allowing for flexibility

Ritual:

1. Make tea
2. Open my writing editor
3. Write something that feels true
4. Hit publish

Minimum completion threshold: A paragraph (2-3 sentences), published.

Why a writing practice?

As a through-line between all my creative practices

I have a lot of very different creative practices, and sometimes they feel a little too disjointed. As much as I love chaos, sometimes I get lost in it all and feel like can’t find my ground. This is especially true because I’m not the type of multidisciplinary artist that does many things at once. I’m the type that goes 100% in on something, let it take over my life, and then set it aside completely to move onto the next thing.

The only tangibly consistent thing between all my creative practices is my brain: all the parallels that I’m drawing between mediums and insights I’m learning from them. And the most direct way I can think to actualize the potential energy in my brain into kinetic “exists-in-the-world” energy, is through writing.

As a practice of moving and releasing creative energy

Even in times when I’m consumed by scarcity mindset, there is one thing I’ve always felt in overabundance: ideas. Never in my life have I been out of thoughts, things to say, concepts dancing in my head. Every day, I wake up with ideas swirling, and I go to sleep with new ideas swirling.

But a lot of the time, that’s where they stay. At most, they’re shared with my close friends. My friends have served as a sufficient outlet (and thank god, because if I didn’t have them to spew my thoughts to, I think my head will explode) but I have a lot more thoughts that aren’t relevant to or asked for by any of my friends. Those thoughts either staying living in my head or in my notes app, and they get stuck there. Stuck energy is blocked energy, and blocked energy becomes creative block, decision paralysis, perfectionism, procrastination, fear, whatever you wanna call it.

I want to develop a practice of moving energy (that potential energy in my brain mentioned earlier), so it doesn’t stay stuck in my system.

Logs of my trek

Monday December 1st — Sharing the insides of my brain.

yay, I did it! I started with some stream-of-consciousness journaling to get the juices flowing, and that helped me conceptualize what I could write about. Then I started the actual writing, and it ended up becoming about something totally different, which is great. Starting is definitely the hardest part, and once I get going I’m like a firehose that won’t stop. Eventually I had to pick an actual topic and redirect myself back to it every now and then, because I don’t wanna just post a ramble.

Wednesday December 3rd — Between hyperfixation and flow state

I had an mini epiphany during my therapy session yesterday and I wanted to write about that. But the day ran away from me, so I wrote it today.

There was definitely some perfectionism in the beginning coming from a place of “this idea is so important and so insightful and SO GOOD, I wanna write it perfectly to do it justice”. Caused a bit of paralysis to start and I edited the intro a bunch of times, until I finally let myself “sound dumb” and that was what actually produced an intro I was happy with.

And then at the end of writing, a lot of self-criticism came up, especially since in the beginning I was hyping up my own thoughts so much. Criticisms like, is this piece actually worth reading, this idea is actually pretty basic idk why I thought it was so important, this piece doesn’t have a strong thesis and I’m kinda rambly, etc.

BUT ultimately I’m actually SO PROUD of what I wrote, and equally proud of the fact that I wrote and published something. It feels great. I love writing. I also cringe at my own writing, but in a good way like when you know you put yourself out there and risked criticism. I have never considered myself a writer or even someone who likes to write, but I’m changing my mind a bit.

Friday December 5th — Falling in love with my own movement

I’m noticing an unintentional every-other-day cadence here, and I’m not mad at it. Yesterday the day got away again, so I wrote today. I spent much longer writing today, unexpectedly, but I love what I’ve written.

I have a hunch that not only is my writing improving with each piece, but that this exercise of publishing my words has inadvertently encouraged me to use my voice more. I am speaking my thoughts more in this community’s chat, other group chats, in social media comments, and in responses to my friends’ stories.

I sent a newsletter to my email list today for the first time in ages, and I’m noticing a steadiness the way I wrote there. I sounded like myself, not like a friendlier, happier version of myself that I used to take on in hopes of motivating people to buy something or take an action.

Monday December 8th — In defense of pettiness

I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to write today, because I was going through some heavy emotions. I ended up writing about my perception of heavy emotions over time, and writing about it turned out to be a huge balm for me. Articulating it took a lot of effort, but I was able to get it off my chest and give myself the validation I was looking for in regards to these heavy emotions.

Wednesday December 10th — Freestyling my calligraphy

I couldn’t sleep last night so I got up to practice calligraphy. In the middle of doing that I had an insight about this practice analogous to another creative practice, which happens pretty often. But this time I actually took time to write it out and articulate it fully instead of just jotting it down to myself in my notes app.

Final reflections

Separating creating from sharing

A friend asked me why I don’t send an email to my newsletter list every time I publish a new post, like how Substack does it. Instead, I send an email once a week to update my email list about my world, and I link to any posts I’ve written that week. There’s an intention, rhythm, ritual, and threshold in sending emails which are entirely different from the intention, rhythm, ritual, and threshold in writing a blog post.

This separation of concerns happened subconsciously, but looking back I realize that this is one of the main reasons I didn’t develop anticipatory dread or fear of expectations around my writing practice.

The energy around my writing practice — same as any of my creative practices — is deeply personal, immersive, and “heads down”, centered around self expression and private intention. The energy around sharing my work is centered around being in relationship with others, communication, and receiving feedback. It’s like introversion and extroversion, or yin and yang. Neither is more important than the other, but they are distinctly different energies, and to conflate them is a huge disservice to both.

Tiny containers are the greatest permission slip

A crucial part of planning our creative trek was to set a minimum completion threshold. This wasn’t a gag, it wasn’t an arbitrary minimum that was so low that I’d never actually allow myself to hit. On the days I sat down to write, I genuinely tried to write only a single paragraph.

Inadvertently, I always exceeded it, by a lot. Most days once I started writing, the hard part was actually reeling myself back in and restricting myself to the topic at hand so I don’t end up rambling for pages.

Even though I never did it, the permission to write only a single paragraph is what was able to sit me down to write in the first place. The permission to make it small, messy, imperfect, stupid, selfish, or obvious. In a world where everyone is striving to “provide value”, a tiny container gives us permission to just be human. And this permission to be human is what allows us the freedom to be creative, which is what eventually leads to great works of “value”.