Underthinking Things
As a spiritual person in a witchy sense, I feel very fortunate to have a Birthday very close to Samhain. It has always been an invitation to slow down right as the world itself is and look inward. This year one of the biggest takeaways I had from my Birthday Reflection Sessions was that I want to move away from striving for perfection and move towards just being.
This is a lesson I’m trying to learn in all sorts of facets of my life; my fear of failure tends to have me spending more time planning than living. Starting small by applying the logic to blogging will be a great way for me to practice and build up the skill and make sure this stays a joyful project for me.
My very first post here was long and full of the many reasons I was excited to start a blog. They all still stand true, but I think in the thrill of sending a project out into the world I lost a core part of my why. That, or all the existential contemplation brought on by turning another year older helped some things click into place. Whose to say.
I guess what I’m trying to understand and acknowledge is that not every blog post has to be a literary work, it just has to be human. I don’t have to keep myself up weaving together a seamless narrative; I could write about anything forever, because everything is connected. On the contrary, short and sweet has a powerful impact in this format.
As an artist living through the time of AI, I’ve been thinking really critically about my perfectionist tendencies. Overthinking and striving for… well, anything other than authenticity, really, was taking the innate humanness out of my work. Once I realized that I began to see it in the other forms of art I create as well. I’m excited to see what leaning into this mindset will do for my creative practice as a whole!
I’m going to start underthinking things as much as possible. I’ve also been calling this building back intuition. I can’t trust my gut when it’s constantly in knots, you know?
Sometimes (often) I worry that I won’t articulate my point perfectly and get misunderstood. There’s also the fear that I will later grow to feel/understand differently. Current social media culture certainly makes this fear worse. Taking a step back though I can see that this mindset also takes the humanness out of it all.
Discourse and seeking understanding is human. Growing and changing is human. Making mistakes and taking accountability is human.
So yeah, moving forward I want to think of this space as my personal catalogue of musings. Not a list of Big Answers, but anecdotes on the human experience from my very specific point of view. Over time those little pieces of unfiltered authenticity will tell a much more raw and poetic story than I could tell with all the overthinking metaphors in the world.