Fear and Creative Constipation
I feel all creatively constipated when I try and make it perfect. When really, all it needs to do is flow.
A website in a weekend, I said. Lots of Coke and plenty of cheese poofs, but I can do that. And so I locked myself away. I mind-mapped and strategized and planned and sketched (in silver Sharpie, no less!) and built things up and tore them apart and swore at WordPress and cried a little. And somewhere along the line I fell in love.
But. (Isn’t there always a but?) But I needed content. I knew what *kind* of content I needed, what words to sprinkle throughout, what ideas to express to make things *just right*. And I am not a writer, and content is intimidating as hell. And so I went to bed instead, with a new website just waiting to show off content that was no more than outlines and notes.
This morning, I work up to a thunderstorm. Small by Buffalo standards, certainly, but a brief and welcome respite from the heat. As I watched the rain and grabbed on to every bit of cool wind that came in through the window, I thought about the site, and how it was likely to get pushed to the bottom for another week as I dive into client work on this Monday morning.
But that little imp inside my head (with a vocabulary that will make a sailor blush, I might add), popped up and said “fuck it!”. And that little imp is right.
For the last five years, and probably before that too, the best decisions and outcomes have come when I’ve done not the “right” thing or the “proper” thing, but said “fuck it!” and just done the thing—whatever thing I was passionate about at the time. Leaving the big corporate job. Moving to Buffalo on a wing and a prayer. Sending a letter to a girl who had no reason to give me the time of day. And now this.
The copy’s not polished—hell, it’s non-existent in places. There’s no smooth mojo, no clear calls to action, none of that stuff that every website should have. It’s incredibly, marvelously imperfect. New website, meet world.
