My Own Cage

I’ve been somewhat of my own cage in recent years.

A cage built from self-consciousness and a fear of being wrong in my creativity.

Worse yet, the songbird within me has been slowly imprisoned within that cage, bar by bar, fear by fear, until it would no longer fly.

I have several friends who are public school teachers, ranging from preschool through high school and beyond. When I’ve spent time with them throughout the years, they often talk about the growth and development of their students: socially, emotionally, physiologically, and of course educationally. No matter the teacher and no matter the grade level, a theme is always present: mistakes are made everyday by students and teachers alike and lessons are learned from those mistakes.

When I was growing up and still in k-12, there were times when I would put my heart and soul into a project - maybe for history, or geography, or math - only to be told towards completion that I didn't do it correctly and needed to redo part or all of the project. Those weren’t fun moments.

In contrast, I would come home from school to my pile of Legos and let my imagination run wild, constructing buildings, spaceships, castles, airplanes - the whole works. No one to tell me that what I was building was wrong, or that a piece isn’t the right color or shape, or connected in the wrong place.

Naturally as I grew up, I played with my Legos less, and the voices of teachers, professors, and peers began to fill that absence. In other words, over time the freedom of creative expression was slowly overtaken by feelings of self-consciousness and the fear of imperfection in word and action. Part of this was due to being a teenager, sure. Yet the worries seem to have cemented themselves in for the long-term.

I remember learning about the cardiovascular system in 5th grade. The teacher asked us, “Considering gravity, how does blood go from our feet to our chest and our head?” I raised my hand and answered, “Elevators?” (Brief class clown moment. Some students laughed and the teacher chuckled. Success.)

As I grew up, though, moments like those became fewer for me. The fear of being wrong and how others might think of me after the fact took hold, slowly but firmly. Creative risks became less in my art and in my music. Creative freedom slowly washed away, leaving a rocky internalized feeling that my creativity might not be right or good enough.

But!

I now recognize that this has been happening within me. I’ve started to peel back the layers of the rotting onion of my creative fears that have been preventing me from going full-swing towards unashamed creative expression. It’s a liberating feeling, and one that I’ve missed.

Recently, I came across a visual artist on YouTube, Louise Fletcher. A lovely lady based in the UK, she has several videos in which she talks about abandoning your own personal fears as an artist (which I believe can translate to any area of life). Fletcher mentions (often) that mistakes will happen in art, but it’s not the end of the world - at the very worst, you start over with new knowledge.

One of my biggest takeaways from Fletcher has been the importance of iterating an idea or an artistic style. Since early 2019, I have been pursuing solo video game development. A major talking point amongst solo developers is the act of iterating: testing mechanics, refining art styles, writing and rewriting characters and their dialogue, etc., until the video game is polished and ready to be released.

I haven’t been iterating effectively with any of my creative projects in recent years, be it a video game or a piece of music. The way in which Fletcher talks about it, however, helped me to understand my needs in my own process. Fear of mistakes and of failure are still within me - I have this assumption that my first iteration of a project should be the perfect, polished, completed thing. It’s rarely (if ever) completed on the first try.

Instead, I’ve been focusing on encouraging my creative freedom - just like when I was a child, playing with my Legos. No one to tell me that a pencil stroke is too harsh, or a chord is wrong.

I’ll tell you what this change has done for me: in the span of only a few days, I sketched and colored 42 drawings, sketched five fictional maps, and wrote out several rules for a tabletop game I’m designing. This is the most output I’ve had in at least a few years. It feels great. The best part is that those drawings and maps and rules are out of my head, no longer trapped by my fears.

I’ve opened the cage. Now I must encourage the songbird to fly free.