Letting Go to Start Again: sharing my creative work

I have always struggled with sharing my work. If it is not the fear of not getting a reaction I secretly hoped for when I wrote it, then it was fear of being seen by the wrong person in the wrong way without knowing exactly who or what that was. When I managed to share something like a blog, the fear of confronting my inconsistency by adding to it and leaving that date gap between posts out there for the world to see. There is a sense of safety in never holding the thing you created up for comparison to yourself or anyone else for that matter. It can be Schrödinger's masterpiece: unobserved so both perfect and terrible at every moment.

That type of thinking though, will just lead to dragging down inspiration and motivation. Why indulge in an idea when it has no place to go back into the vault of my head and not be seen by the world? Why edit an old half finished piece if the improvement will not be any more visible or helpful that the version that already exists? It's self defeating antagonistic "realism" that invades and stagnates the flow of ideas.

I don't have a solution for this. I don't think there is any one single act that I could do that would make this go away. That doesn't mean I can't try to reframe the way I think about it. A blog post by Kening Zhu I read recently (albeit long after it was originally posted). The post frames sharing the work not as seeking approval/an audience, but instead as the exhalation of the creative flow. It is about letting go of something you held tightly to free you up to spend your energy on other things; to grab the next thing and begin the creative cycle again. This resonated with me when I was thinking about my old feelings of: what's the point in editing if it is not really going anywhere. Because the story is not my purpose. Letting the creative energy and ideas be a part of me and then making them other than me to let them go.

This only gets me halfway there though. The what, but now the how. That is yet another friction point that kept me from getting started. If I were to have a place to put the work, or a place to put the edits of work, where would I start, and how would I update when I do start. This also felt like something I needed guidance on.

A YouTube short I can't really remember, mentioned that there had been a famous Microsoft or Apple programmer (the short didn't mention the programmers name) that had this practice for writing code where they would always do it 3 times. If they had 2 weeks to do a project they would spend the first week and a half writing the code. Then they would throw it away and start again from scratch to fix all the things they messed up and learned about when they wrote it the first time. Finally the third time it would be rewritten and come out perfect having had all the unnecessary bits trimmed, mistakes trimmed, and functionally perfect.

This is how I think I need to approach some of the pieces I have waiting to be updated and worked on. The ideas are ones that still sorta linger on the tip of my mind and been reshaped and worked on endlessly over the years. The way they are in my head is probably far from what they actually are in reality. That feels okay though. Understanding that I am going to approach it by rewriting it without getting hung up on any of the original details. After I finish the second draft I can read both and see what happens.

I think lowering my own expectations for what happens when I share my work. It felt like a birth and event to create it, but the impact it had on me isn't diminished by no one else seeing what I created. I am going to try to keep in mind the Micahelsoft Bindows video and his journey to find the origin of the image; which lead him to the strange page Alf's Room; which was a very simple blog maintained by a Japanese man since 1997. The guy who made the video found endless amounts of joy in it's existence. I won't get into the specifics of the man's strange, endearing, and intensely specific documentation and spoil the video, but he does it simply because he enjoys it. He isn't worried about the reception or audience. It is his space on to share his thoughts (told through the perspective of the website's mascot) and doesn't need it to be anything more.

This is what I want to create: space to allow my creative flow to be completed and let go of all the expectations of what I used to think it should be. It's not a solution to all of it, but at least it is a place to start.