The Things I Scrunch Up.

Sometimes I create something and immediately want to scrunch it up.

Sometimes I actually do.

It might be because it hasn’t turned out the way I imagined. The colours feel wrong, the lines aren’t working, or the whole piece seems to be missing whatever it was I saw so clearly in my mind.

Other times, I simply don’t like it—and I can’t always explain why.

There are even moments when I feel embarrassed by what I’ve created. It can feel strangely exposing to make something from nothing, only to look at it and wonder what on earth I was thinking.

What I’m learning, though, is that none of these feelings means I should stop creating.

The frustration is only a moment. So is the disappointment. I need to let myself feel it, move through it and keep going. I may need to put the piece away, paint over it or scrunch it into a ball—but I don’t need to make that moment mean anything more than it does.

It doesn’t mean I’m not an artist.
It doesn’t mean I’ve lost whatever ability I had.
It doesn’t mean the next piece won’t feel completely different.

It is simply part of the process.

I have to remind myself that I create for me—not for approval, praise or a particular outcome. What other people think of the work, whether they connect with it and what happens after I share it are all beyond my control.

This is the part of my story I now feel most at peace with.

Relinquishing control has brought me a kind of freedom that is difficult to put into words. I no longer need every piece to become something. Some pieces are simply places I needed to go. They allowed me to experiment, feel frustrated, make a mess or discover what I don’t want to do next time.

Not everything I create will be beautiful to me.

Not everything will be shared.

Some things may still end up scrunched in the bin.

But none of it is wasted. Every piece is part of the process of returning to myself—and learning to keep creating without needing to know where it will lead.