Your Creativity Needs Friends

Not just more ideas

Self-employment’s biggest side-effect is loneliness. You create alone. You work alone. Until you find community, you very much feel alone.

The loneliness has a big impact on the ebbs and flows of your creativity. It can make you feel like you’re aching for more ideas, different stimulation, or a different medium altogether, when all you’re really wanting is a friend to talk about your writing or content.

I know it seems simple and like something that we should all be coached on the day we decide to pursue creativity as an outlet or a career, but the truth is that we stumble a lot in the pursuit of getting comfortable with saying — I need someone else.

Maybe it’s our innate resistance to needing others. Maybe it’s our inability to believe that needing others isn’t a bad thing, no matter what society claims. Or maybe we’ve just needed permission to find our people.

If you’re the latter, this is your permission slip. You’re guaranteed to feel more creative when you have others to bounce ideas off of. I can promise your creativity will blossom when you see others being creative in their own right.

Your art will get better because it’s no longer being cultivated in a silo.