I think one of the reasons it took me years to start writing, and even longer to take my own writing seriously, and even longer to share it publicly without being overwhelmed with an obscure feeling of shame about wanting to share it…is that I really believed that there was something frivolous in wanting to do creative work. And that there was also something frivolous in taking enormous pleasure in other people’s creative work, and that I therefore had to be very furtive and a little ashamed about my passions.

I wish that my younger self could have read Charlotte Shane’s latest newsletter, but I think the next best thing is for more people (someone who hasn’t begun doing their work? or still feels a deep sense of anxiety about it?) to read this essay! It’s very insightful and very beautiful—and the beauty of the prose matters because it’s an argument for creating your own, distinctive forms of beauty:

In times of hopelessness, guilt attaches to anything and everything including (especially?) the indispensable engineered into scarcity: food, fresh air, clean water, generosity, curiosity, joy.

Nobody reading this, and certainly not the person writing it, is without resources that many people don’t have. Listing the gifts would take days. (A computer, literacy, clean clothes, a home.) Probably you and I aren’t going to go without food or bathing for very long, even if we do it briefly as a form of protest or recreation. Forfeiting creation may, subconsciously, appeal as an alternate penance.

Here’s a question for everyone who writes, paints, composes, etc., and is haunted by a sense that they’re wrong (bad, selfish, irresponsible) for doing so: if you give up your songs, your art, your poems, what will you replace them with? Where does that energy go? Is writing or art-making in the top five most frivolous things you do? If you were to make a list of all the wasteful ways you expend yourself, would imagination or journaling or rehearsal be on it? What good things happen when you stop? What good things are prevented if you persist?

Shane also points out how strange and uneven our guilt is—we think there is something useless and embarrassing about creating (who do we think we are, pretending to the status of artist/writer/musician/poet)…but for some reason, it’s not embarrassing to be cornered and forced into the minor role of simply consuming?

Without conscientious intervention, anxiety channels itself where and how the society directs, meaning it accumulates around objects of denigration and devaluation. Doordashing a little treat is harmless but making music is a waste of time.