The Lie We Tell Ourselves as an Excuse to Do Nothing

The truth is that I never thought of myself as the creative type.

It’s kinda funny, considering I’ve:

• Choreographed martial arts and dance routines

• Produced one of the first viral videos on the internet

• Constructed multiple set pieces for theater productions

But I didn’t feel creative because I thought I had to make everything from scratch.

Growing up, every performance-based discipline I explored (music, dance, theater), I followed someone else’s notes, someone else’s choreography, someone else’s script.

Actually, I was pretty good at interpreting at what to do in all of them, enough to even be competitive.

But despite all those trophies and accomplishments, I always came back to the same conclusion: “You’re just good at copying, at adapting, at executing…”

NOT creating.

In the past, whenever I made an attempt at producing something from scratch,

• the silence consumed me,

• the blank page seemed endless,

• the empty stage appeared vast and open.

It took me a long time to realize that it wasn’t skill that I lacked.

It was external permission; a hunger for validation.

It was the lack of confidence to trust my own voice without authoritative approval.

It kills me to admit that this limiting mindset persisted for years.

And it wasn’t until I had

• lived a few years on my own,

• taken my life into my own hands,

• jumped at the opportunities I actively sought out,

that I finally realized something that dragged me out of that mental quicksand…

You don’t need force yourself to start from nothing.

You’ve already lived countless stories worth telling.

You just haven’t found the courage to share them yet.

Creativity isn’t something that some are born with and others are not...

It’s a choice.

And once I made that decision, things blew wide open.

Once I let go of that boat anchor of a mindset, I found my creative voice.

That’s when the concept of the digital heirloom became possible in my mind.

Not as content to be shared on social media.

Not as an onstage performance with a script to recite.

But as proof that I existed in the real world, that I possessed insights from a lifetime of experience, that I only needed the courage and capacity to express them using my own methods.

It took me years to understand this truth:

You are creative. You only need to decide what you will bring into the world.

Next time, I’ll talk about what followed this revelation; a deeper fear that threatened to stop me once I did start sharing…