Create… even when no-one’s watching
Photos of a pasta making experiment because I haven’t shared them anywhere yet & they deserve a little moment.
At the start of my 1st seminar on Novel Writing with the writer Ian Marchant, he got up, went to the whiteboard and wrote “Kill your parents”.
I was shocked. For a second, the past year flashed before my eyes, with the hardship of studying for the bacalaureat* and my English language exam… whilst being in a long distance relationship and planning my wedding & researching universities in the UK. All those months of stress and hard work, a hefty loan on top, to find myself here, taught by an insane person. I wanted to scream.
A moment later, Ian turned around and warned us that, before we get our phones out and take photos of this for outraged social media posts, we should know it’s a metaphor and he will explain it in a second.
Long story short, it stands for something along these lines (I’m totally paraphrasing here): write like no-one is going to read it. Write without restraint or fear of judgment. Don’t think about what your parents, your church minister or your landlord will think about you. Kill them all in your imagination, and write with the freedom of knowing this is for your eyes only. Then, and only then, after you got out what you needed to, you can start showing your work to others, and worry yourself with getting it published. Until that work of your is complete, write as if no-one else is going to read it.
Now, a decade later, having moved through a few other creative pursuit, I’m not writing as much as I used to, but I’m still creating obsessively.
I taught myself leathercraft and for 8 years, Minustudio.co was my all-consuming career. Then came Howling Wolf - a coffee shop that grew quickly, taking over most of my time and sanity… and, through all these years of designing and creating leather goods, building a new menu, baking new recipes, and all the minutiae of every day work life as a business owner, my passion for photography fed on crumbs of time and energy I had left. Slowly, it grew into an obsession, until I created my portfolio and decided this was it.
I still own the cafe, and I’m still working on a small collection of leather goods in the background, but photography is what keeps me up at night - quite literally. I woke up at 3:30 this morning and couldn’t fall back asleep because my head was full of ideas and I wanted to write some stuff down for future shoots.
The other day I was feeling down and wondering, once again “why the hell am I doing this to myself? I’ve got a thriving business already, why am I pushing myself to burnout, day by day, by creating work that hardly gets any views, and rarely lands me any paying clients? Should I even call myself a professional photographer, since right now it seems to be nothing more than a glorified hobby?”
The next day, Ben and I were hauling furniture from the spare bedroom (used as a walk-in wardrobe + gym) into the tiny bedroom that served as my studio in the past 2 years. As of yesterday, my studio got at least twice bigger, and I won’t allow myself to feel bad for asking Ben to drill, once again, holes in the walls and hang cabinets and shelves. This just makes sense, and had to be done. If anything, I wonder why we didn’t set up the studio here to begin with?
As I sat at the desk with my coffee, and scrolled through the phone (a habit I swear I’m trying to curb, at least in the first hours of the day!) I came across the weekly newsletter form James Clear. If you never heard of him, he wrote Atomic Habits - a book that helped me changed my life in ways I didn’t dream of last year. In today’s newsletter, this quote felt written exactly for me: “If you want to rise, you need a lot of shots on goal. Keep showing up. Keep making new material. Eventually, you catch a lucky break.”
Today, I feel inspired and driven to create something, anything. I know tomorrow I might feel like I’m screaming into the void, asking to be seen, asking for my work to be seen… I might feel deflated and discouraged, I might lose the sense of purpose I find in photography, I might lose myself in this all mess of being an artist, but you know what?
As long as I wake up the next day and try again, it is all worth it. If nobody gets to see the work I’m doing, so be it. If anything, that’s even better, because then I don’t have the pressure of perfection. Let the passion drive me, and let me create, even if just for the sake of it.
For what other kind of life is worth living, other than one spent pursuing what makes us feel alive to begin with?
Photos from 2 different sides of my creative life. I’ve been stressing so much about this ‘split’ between my passions, I failed to see that my photography style lends itself to all of them: food & craft (pictured in this post) travel an lifestyle (plenty of that here. )
If you read all this long piece of writing, I hope it inspired and encouraged you. Go out there and create. Don’t worry about everyone else, but follow your vision, and see where it leads you!
Carmina
