Letter to a Friend

This post from Dreama Tolle Perry's blog really hit home with me today.

Here's a quote:

"An artist will paint when the pain of not painting becomes greater than the pain of painting" That's a quote from Art and Fear. YOU think you are a unique loser. That your situation is different, so different than what other creative people face. You think that others are writing and producing rather than sitting and thinking about it. You think you are the only one who has been paralyzed with fear to the point of not getting out of the car to do a walk on acting part. You fear that what you have hoped to be is a myth, a lie, that you have deluded yourself.

The untruth here is this. Thinking that somehow this is not how it works. That if you were really meant to be a painter, a writer, a musician, you would just be chomping at the bits, painting regularly, acting regularly, taking massive action every moment on your dreams. There is what we think it means to be a creative person and lead a creative life and then there is the reality of what it means to be a creative person and lead a creative life. Bringing something into reality from nothing. Some thing from no thing. Second guessing ourselves. Hoping for good things, certain we deserve none of it. Because somehow we feel we haven't earned it. We are not smart as others, weren't born to the right parents, grew up in the wrong place, attended the wrong schools, made poor job decisions, hung out with the wrong people. How skilled and schooled we become on berating ourselves."

And there is a lot more in the letter that Dreama wrote to her friend that speaks to my heart.  I'm going to reread that tonight before I pull out my paints to start creating number one of a thousand.