Make it for you

Process > Product

Last week I wrote a poem. It all came out at once and when I read it back, I cried.

I wanted to share it right away because sharing is a thing I love to do. Instead, I let it sit.

The next day I read it to my partner. I couldn’t even get to the end of it before getting choked up. He liked it and that’s always nice when someone likes a thing you made, but I realized in that moment that that poem…that poem was for me.

It came from who-knows-where, arriving in plain text on my computer screen like magic—poof! It was a release even to write it. To get the feeling down. And reading it back was like a healing balm.

The world we live in is so focused on productivity, the thing you produce. What do you do?, they ask. I’m a writer, she says. Have you been published? they ask. As if being a writer has anything to do with being published.

We are so eager to measure the tangible things that we loose sight of the magic that makes things happen.

If you never posted another thing you made to the internet, would you still be an artist?

Yes. 1000% yes.

Maybe the thing we make is for others. Maybe it’s meant to be out in the world, in a book at the airport or hanging in a museum. And maybe that thing we make is for us. The process of making releases something in us, heals something in us. We write the words down, we read them back, we cry.

And then, maybe, we share them.

Jump + Pray,

Joce

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