Sharing Your Creativity (Recorded)

Have you ever been in a group setting, maybe at school, work, church or an open mic night where you were invited to share something you created? Maybe someone suggested you start a blog (are those still a thing?, YouTube/ TikTok channel or a podcast. Maybe you want to but can’t bear to take that step. I get it, being creative is one thing. Being creative in front of people is something else entirely. It can be very intimidating, “Turns the legs to jelly”, as Thanos would say.

“I love creating, it’s the sharing that frightens me”

While I have rarely felt afraid to try something new, the act of sharing my creations with others is terrifying. For example, it took me over a year to start this blog and podcast, and it took several months before I dared to share it with people, and even then it has only been a very small group of people who were invited to listen/ read at first. Whatever my creative obsession is at the moment, be it custom sneakers, building furniture, writing stories, songs or poems or making digital content I’m super excited until the time comes to put my work out there for the world to see. I love creating, it’s the sharing that frightens me.

Here’s why: When you share what you create you are sharing a part of you. Your heart, emotions your very soul laid bare for others to see. There can be nothing more frightening than that. If they reject your creation, it can feel like they are rejecting a part of you. If they criticize, it is as if they are looking deep into your soul and declaring you unworthy of love and understanding. While we may not verbalize it this way, it is as if we know that once people reject what we create, we will end up alone and unloved, jobless, penniless, living under a bridge with a homeless guy named Gill who shares is daily catch of rats with you so you have something to eat while muttering about being an undiscovered artist. Maybe that’s just me.

I think I drove that point into and under the ground.

But (of course there is a but).

When we share what we create, we bring light into the world. When we share our creative work we are sharing our hearts, our souls with those around us. That’s what is awesome about creativity. We get to play with that divine spark that resides in all of us, we get to tap into the same energy that brought our world into being. We bring light into the dark wasteland inhabited by those “cold and timid souls who know neither victory not defeat” #maninthearena. We position ourselves to inspire, lift up, challenge and encourage those who encounter our work. Our bared souls demand a response!

(getting a bit melodramatic but you get my point)

The world needs you. The world needs your creativity. Be it in business, painting, comedy, sculpture, dance, music, poetry, macaroni art, video, t-shirts, stickers, unicorn hats, stories, house building, or being a paintball trampoline basketball player (It’s not what it sounds like, it’s basketball, but you have paintball guns and the court is a giant trampoline).

I am aware that I left something very important out. I left out the part where I teach you how to conquer your fear of sharing your creativity. There is a reason for that.

I didn’t tell you how to get over the fear because I don’t know how. I have not conquered my fear. I am afraid right now as I write this, the anticipation of sharing this with you (whoever you are) is scary. But here I am, doing it anyway. I don’t know if the fear will ever go away, but so long as it’s not crippling fear I will keep going. You should to.

Alright friends it’s time for your next adventure,

I’ll miss you

Understanding Self (Recorded)

Manager, supervisor, trainer, writer, creator, artist, teacher. These titles and more have given me a sense of purpose, of identity. They help me know who I am. My titles give me a reason to get up in the morning, they show me what I need to do with my life. But what happens when you take them away?

I end up lost.

I don’t know who I am without my work. I don’t know what to do with myself without my mission, my purpose, my telos. I remember my first year teaching, I lost my mind during winter break. Two weeks without my job and I did not know what to do with myself. I drove myself and my family crazy. I rarely take a vacation, mainly because I don’t know what to do with a vacation. If I don’t have my work, then I have to come up with another objective to achieve, another project to work on. Anything to distract me from the reality that I have no idea who I am.

The last few years have really driven this point home for me, as my growing health problems have kept me from doing all that I want to do, that I think I need to do to justify my presence on this planet. In a season where so many parts of my identity have been stripped away, I have begun to realize an important truth:

The reality is that who we are is so much more than what we do.

Who am I? What am I? There are so many days when I wonder if I am even human. With all of my intersectionality’s I have always felt left of normal. I am a minority in so many ways that I often feel utterly alone. Who among my human relations can I talk to about all of my problems that can understand what I am going through? Who is in my tribe that I can relate to? Where are the elders for me to follow? Where is my tribe, where are my people? How would I even recognize them since I don’t even know who I am?

These thoughts bring another question to mind. Do I need to know who I am? Is it necessary for me to understand myself to live a good life? For example, I know that I love tea, poetry, being creative and teaching. I know this like I know the sky is blue. Does anything else matter beyond this? Maybe that should be enough. Maybe I will never find my tribe, maybe I don’t have one. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe I don’t need to have a tribe, it could be enough for me to be a unicorn in a world of horses. Though in reality I don’t think this is the case, I believe that there are those like me, I have found a few of them. Maybe there are more.

In every relationship, if you want to get to know the person better you need to spend time with them. If I am being honest I don’t spend enough time with myself. Maybe you can relate. We use work, entertainment, social media, movies, creative projects, video games and books to keep ourselves occupied. Maybe if we stopped moving, stop doing, allowed our bodies and minds to be still, breathe and just be with our hearts and our minds for a moment we could get to know ourselves better.

“To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment .”

-Eckhart Tolle

Changing Oneself (Recorded)

I had a student ask me one time; Should you change yourself to match others because you are considered weird?

This one was an easy answer for me. No. You were made who you are the way you are for a reason. I have lived my entire life being considered weird by what felt like everyone around me, and for a little while I tried to be “normal”. It was a disaster. I didn’t make more friends, and the people I did manage to gather around me were not real friends at all. I couldn’t blame them, I was being fake so I deserved to gain fake friends. That’s the biggest problem with changing who you are. You end up with a life that drains you of life, because all of your energy is used up trying to be what others want you to be and trying to then maintain that lie. Not worth it.

If there were ever moments when I was great at what I did as a teacher, it was because of who I am, not who I pretend to be.

Your greatest accomplishments, your best friendships will only come from your authentic self. Man, I sound like a self-help book, and not the good kind. But seriously, your “weirdness” is what makes you great. The world needs you, exactly the way you are. Well, maybe you have room for improvement, we all do. But improving yourself and changing yourself are two different things. For example what the smartphone is, a handheld multi-functional piece of technology has not changed. What has changed is what it can do and how well it can do it. It has improved, but has not changed from its primary function and purpose. I know this is an oversimplification, but bear with me. My point is that you should look to improve yourself, not try to change who you are (unless you are a cannibal in which case I would encourage you to change one thing about yourself).

Will you be everyone’s cup of tea? Of course not. But even if only %1 of the world’s population accepted you, that is still well over a million people. Steve Jobs was weird, George Washington was weird, Aristotle was weird, Hirohito Araki is weird. But what they created, what they did impacted thousands if not millions of lives.

Don’t waste your time blending in, you’re not an ice cube.

I hope this was useful, feel free to send me any other random questions that pop into your brain.

Time for your next adventure,

I’ll miss you

It’s okay to be meh (Recorded)

“How are you doing, how are you?” This well-meaning question has often been a problem for me in my life. It has often been a source of anxiety. I know that this is something that “normal” people say to each other, I have learned that I am supposed to ask this question as well. I know that we are supposed to care about each other, and we show this by asking people about the state of their lives and health. But here is the problem, I often don’t know what I am feeling. When people ask me how I am, I often don’t know what to say. Sometimes I respond with, “I don’t know how but I am”, which apparently is considered to be rude. People assumed that I am trying to be clever, and I supposed that I am. The reality is that this answer is often the most accurate one. Sometimes I will state that I am okay or that I am alright, usually without must emotion. I have learned that this is not the right answer either. I have often been met with a concerned, “Just okay? What’s wrong?”. Then I try to think about what is wrong. I have learned that when you look for problems you find them. So then I start talking about whatever is wrong in my life, which is met with pop-psychology nonsense designed to make me feel better so that I can be as pseudo-cheerful as the rest of the world. When I am out running errands I have intentionally avoided people I know, even people I really like just so that I don’t have to deal with this situation. Especially if I am already in a near shutdown or burntout state.

Over time I learned that the “correct” answer to the how-are-you question is “I’m great!” Or “I am well, thank you” (said with a big smile). After years of observing other “normal” people, I have realized that no one is supposed to be anything other than great. If you are not great, that is a problem that needs to be fixed. You are not supposed to just be okay, and feeling meh is not acceptable. Apparently we are supposed to be positive 24/7 and if we are not then we need to find a way to get back to that state of mind. Yoga. Meditation. Medication. Alcohol. Whatever brings you back to euphoria is what you need to do so that you can be fun to be around.

But what if that’s not true? What is so wrong with feeling neutral? What is wrong with not knowing how you feel? Why do we have to feel pressured to come up with an answer that makes other people happy? That’s what makes “normal” people so exhausting, there are so many expectations that everyone seems to know but no one gave me the rule book so I am constantly second-guessing everything I say and do. What I need to do is stop trying so hard to fit in with “normal” people, because it hasn’t worked in 39 years anyway. I need to just tell people I don’t know how I am instead of trying to say what I think they want to hear.

And that, my fellow humans, is my ramble/ rant about the greeting “how are you?”. I wonder if other autistic people have this problem with being asked how they are or how they are feeling.