Your Creative Voice Matters
Or they wouldn't be trying so hard to silence it
What I know is that you are daring to choose a creative life. Even and especially when things feel terrifying and impossible, you choose trust over control, beauty over cruelty, possibility over the broken status quo. Again and again, you show up willing to encounter the unknown and to open the gate of your heart when it wants to stay closed.
You do this in the way you lead your team, teach your classes, and write your shows, poems, and novels.
You do this in the music you make, the groups you organize, the films you create, the things you post, and the way you speak to your kids. In the way you write, coach your clients, run your business, resist Facism, parent, and care for grandchildren, elders, pets.
You do this in thousands of ways that may go unnoticed, but are never insignificant.
And the single, most sacred belief of a brave creator like you is that your creative voice matters.
Even when governments try to suppress it. Even when the voice in your head tells you it doesn’t.
Your creative voice matters because how you see the world – what you love about it and what you refuse to let it get away with — the questions you can’t stop wondering about and the utterly unique ways you will channel those questions — will never be repeated in the history of time.
Even if you don’t feel like you have access to the courage, clarity, time, or a place where you feel you belong. Even if you feel like your best work is behind you, the drafts feel endlessly shitty, or the people in power are actively silencing you and those you believe in.
It matters because progressive change happens when hopeful people say yes to their voices and use them for good.
Your voice matters or they wouldn’t be trying so hard to silence it.
The fact that voices of creative people are unlawfully censored and suppressed is proof of their profound power.
The fact that your critical inner voice makes a big fuss every time you try to create something truthful is a sign of that thing’s (and your) power.
Your creative voice matters.
This is the belief that carries us through the dark nights, the doubts, the rejections, the crickets, the feelings of despair and inefficacy. And through censorship, suppression, and authoritarian rule.
This isn’t a feel-good aphorism but an essential belief that creates the foundation for all acts of creation.
For some of us this belief is also really hard to internalize. We may have been taught that being humble means you don’t get to believe in the power of your contributions.
And some of us were taught to confuse this belief with the problematic, scary belief that causes oppression, genocide, and the collapse of democracies: That my voice matters more than yours.
But these two beliefs are opposites, not cousins. One creates worlds, the other destroys them. One belongs to a tyrant, the other, a creator.
The brave creator must fiercely protect her ability to believe three things:
My voice matters
Your voice matters
Our voices strengthen each other
These beliefs empower the most fundamental and important action a creator takes: to show up.
The power of showing up is the creator’s greatest tool, though we may be constantly blocked from using it. And I don’t mean blocks like imposter syndrome and the procrastination that productivity culture blames on you.
Centuries of systems and conditioning reinforce the idea that your voice, vision, and contributions are not valuable or wanted. Right now, people in power are working hard to keep you from showing up by convincing you your voice doesn’t matter.
Or maybe you’re hearing it from an inner voice — the Inner Critic, Censor, or as I call it, the Tiny Terrorist. In whatever way you are experiencing it the most, these messages designed to hijack your faith and prevent you from action are debilitating, real, and wrong.
Today’s Invitation: Show up
This is the first rule of creativity, and it’s offered as a radical invitation to creative motion without the pressure.
I was in my late 20s in grad school when I learned this rule and it revolutionized my entire life. Up until that point, I was convinced that the first rule of creativity was to be very excellent and brilliant and dazzling and 100% guarantee that you love me and my work.
The idea that my MAIN responsibility was to show up felt so freeing and simultaneously confronting to my entire belief system. How could I guarantee that I wouldn’t suck? And if I sucked, how would I ever be worthy of love and belonging? But the idea that IF I show up things could happen and those things weren’t all part of my control woke something up in me that I had forgotten.
And this is how I started to reclaim trust with my creativity. I rewrote my definition of success to focus on showing up with enthusiasm rather than producing genius work. And I have to remind myself of this definition 1000 times a day.
We can’t mistake this rule’s simplicity for the courage it requires.
Showing up requires us to override the culture’s desire to keep us quiet and waiting — waiting to make sense, to be normal, to be ready, to be perfect, to be certain, to be healed, to be linear — before we speak up or bring forth our gifts.
And our journey with showing up is dynamic. I call this keeping up with our edges.
Here are four patterns I often see in coaching — notice if any of these resonate with your process right now:
4 Myths that keep us from Creative Action:
When you feel stuck in paralysis
The myth: You need to know what you are doing in order to show up
The truth: You need to be willing and you need to choose a focus. Make showing up easier than not showing up and give yourself full permission to arrive as you are — messy, shaky, human and do the tiniest next brave thing. One sentence. 2 minutes on the thing. One phone call. It’s okay if you’re not on time. Bird by bird as the brilliant Annie Lammot says.
When you’ve been showing up, but avoiding your edge
The myth: Consistency alone is enough
The truth: There are seasons of our creative work (you’ll know if this is you) when it’s time to explore something deeper, risk more, or go to an edge. You’ve been showing up but now you are being called to show up in a new way. This is your soul talking and listening takes you to your next expansive frontier — but doing so requires that you sacrifice comfort.
When you’re losing faith
The myth: Showing up is only worth it when you can guarantee it will work or be well-received
The truth: The act of showing up grows faith and trust, which do work, over time. But results grow underground. We need to radically rewrite our definition of success here and this can be paradigm-shifting.
When you’re overwhelmed
The myth: Showing up only counts when it’s big
The truth: This is the cultural disease of not-enoughness at its finest, using shame and perfectionism to contaminate your creative process with the belief you have no power. Showing up is about what you can do, today, from where you are. Sometimes that means rest, and sometimes that means joy — both essential parts of the process. Repeat after me: Everything counts.
3 prompts to catalyze creative motion:
Where are you putting too much pressure on yourself to create? How might reframing your definition of success as showing up shift things for you?
How and when were you taught to doubt the worth of your voice and creative expression? And how is that coming up in your process now?
What’s the next creative risk you feel called to take?
Keeping us from showing up and speaking up is how oppressive systems win. But we won’t let them. I’m here to remind you that your voice is very very needed, and your decision to live a creative life amidst the chaos of tyranny is very very brave.
So let today be the day you trust and honor your singular voice by showing up in whatever way you are called to, from where you are, in whatever way you can. And let it also be the day you decide to let yourself be human as you go — bumpy, uncomfortable, confused, insecure, angsty, imperfect.
Your creative voice matters
(Don’t forget this)
RESOURCES + ACTIONS:
For those in the US → sign up for an October 18th No Kings March near you or come join me in Maplewood, New Jersey!
If a plan would help → Listen to Stacey Abrams outline the 10 Ways to Save Democracy (And read the 10 Steps here)
Support your favorite independent journalists and creators by becoming a paid subscriber, or liking/commenting/sharing their work (everything helps!) A few of mine include Joy-Ann Reid Heather Cox Richardson Karen Attiah Liz Plank
3 Quotes:
1. To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that’s political, in its most profound way.
— June Jordan
2. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writing is justified because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system, and for a comatose public. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources.
— Toni Morrison
3. Remain unwavering in your care for our collective well-being. This is how you resist and dissolve the virus of supremacy.
— Jaiya John
A note about AI:
I wrote this letter to you myself, and it’s an honor to do so. Is anything resonating with you? What are you showing up for right now? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
The Tiny Terrorist! Gah! Thank you for this, Liz - I love the invitations and the quotations. I also love the idea that our creative expression is a way for us to be strong together, I couldn't agree more!