Start The Week By Apologizing To Your Inner Creative

You’ll thank yourself later

At the top of a piece of paper — of any size — write down, “I’m sorry” and then add some bullet points. I want you to jot down all the times that you told your inner creative that it was:

• stupid
• inadequate
• incompetent
• not as good as the next person
• childish
• too out of the box

I want you to apologize even if you don’t mean it just yet because putting down the bad words, the hurtful phrases, the limiting beliefs, it’ll shift the power back to you. You’ll slowly start realizing that you can bypass them because they aren’t truths and they aren’t the size of a boulder that you’ve been imagining is standing in your way.

My whole life, my inner creative has been a voice in my head that pushes me towards creativity in order to get to know myself better. I’ve been able to define my relationship to my daily life and to larger experiences, like loss, grief, heartbreak, joy, and pleasure, because I’ve been able to put pen to paper. I know I should thank my inner creative every day and yet…

And yet there were still many days when my self-critic was much louder than my inner creative. There were even worse days when my self-critic was yelling at my inner creative. My inner creative deserves an apology because it did nothing wrong, other than exist.

As you’re apologizing remind yourself again that your inner creative has nothing to prove, all it wants is space to exist. All it wants is space to show you what it can do when you’re working together instead of getting in its way.

I write about creativity, mental health, grief, and how to cope with life’s everyday challenges on VivNunez.com. Follow along on my Instagram for mini-essays on the same topics, and sign up for a weekly newsletter of encouragement.