I was planning content the other day and I realized I was stressing myself out for literally no reason. I kind of do a lot, and I’ve been trying to think of myself less as somebody who’s constantly trying to create content and more as a distribution center for everything that’s already inside of me. Because whatever you are is what you’ll be. I don’t have to sit down every morning and manufacture something worth saying. I already have thoughts. I’m already building things. I’m already learning things and noticing things and changing my mind about things. There is already water there. My job is really just to let it flow out of me.
But I was sitting there doing the exact opposite.
I was thinking, is this too much to post? Should I post this today? Should I wait? Does this make sense after the other thing I posted last week on that other account? Are people going to understand why I am talking about this? Am I doing too much? And I could literally feel myself getting more stressed the more I tried to micromanage the flow of water out of me.
And then I realized that I could also just... let it do what water tends to do.
Flow in the direction it’s been released. Post it. Write it. Put it somewhere. Let it float out of me and move on with my life.
And that was when I had the intrusively pleasant thought, you think too much and that is your prison.
Because how many of us are completely immobilized by thinking?
Not because we don’t know what we want to do. A lot of the time you actually do know. But then you start asking yourself a thousand questions about whether you’re allowed to do it.
Is this the right time? Am I supposed to do this? What are people going to think if I do this? Is this smart? Is this stupid? Should I wait? What if I change my mind? What if it doesn’t work? What if people don’t like it?
And now something that could have taken five minutes has been sitting in your head for three months, God forbid three years.
you learned to ask for permission
The thing is, I don’t even think we randomly became like this. Our entire lives have basically been built inside systems of approval and denial. From the time you’re a child, somebody else is deciding whether you did it right. You do the assignment and somebody grades it. You apply somewhere and somebody accepts or denies you. You want the job and somebody decides whether you’re qualified. You make something and there’s some number attached to whether people approved of it. So much of life is somebody else saying yes or no.
And if you spend enough of your life inside of a system like that, eventually you don’t even need the system anymore because you have learned how to recreate it inside yourself.
You become both the person who wants something and the person standing at the desk deciding whether you’re allowed to have it.
That is insaneeeeeeeee when you really think about it.
You can leave the school. Leave the job. Leave whatever system originally taught you to think that way, and still have the entire approval process running in your head. Nobody is actually stopping you anymore, but you’re still filling out imaginary paperwork waiting for imaginary permission from an imaginary person who is apparently in charge of your life.
And I think there comes a point where you have to realize that the system was never necessarily designed to benefit you. It was designed to benefit the creator of the system.
That doesn’t even automatically make the system evil. A school needs a way to decide whether you passed the class. A company needs a way to decide who they hire. Instagram needs some way to organize millions of pieces of content. Fine. Those systems have a reason for existing.
But why would you take a system that was created to help somebody else manage you and then install it in your own head?
Why are you still managing yourself on behalf of a system you are not even in anymore?
I think that is where people get stuck.
You’re looking for approval from something that no longer has any authority over you, and because nobody is physically there to approve or deny you anymore, you just keep thinking.
Thinking feels responsible. Thinking feels like you are doing something. Thinking feels safer than acting because as long as you are still thinking about the thing, you cannot technically be wrong about it yet.
But you also can’t go anywhere.
I would never run my business like this
And the reason this became so obvious to me was because I realized I don’t think this way at all when it comes to Baru.
Baru Gallery is a ceramic gallery for makers. Basically, I find really beautiful ceramics and ceramicists and surface their work to buyers. Sometimes that’s just an individual person who likes beautiful things. Sometimes it could be an interior designer, a wedding planner, an event specialist, a bigger buyer. Whatever. The point is that I am cataloguing beautiful work and putting it somewhere people can actually find it.
And because I understand the psychology behind buying and selling and attention, I understand that nobody can know the thing exists if you don’t show them.
A maker can be the most beautiful ceramic collection in the world. If nobody ever sees it, what exactly are we doing?
You have to speak about it. You have to show it. You have to surface it. You have to distribute it.
And I have never once, not one time, looked at Baru and thought, Hmm. Maybe I have too many ceramicists in this catalogue.
That thought has literally never occurred to me because from a bottom-line perspective it makes no sense.
Why would I find another person making beautiful things and decide I should probably hide them because I already showed people some beautiful things yesterday?
Why would I think there is only room for one style of bowl? Why would I think everybody who comes to the gallery needs to like every single piece? That’s not even how buying works.
You show people what exists and they decide what works for them. And I was sitting there thinking about that and realizing how differently I treat myself.
With Baru, I understand distribution. I understand that my job is not to stand in front of every item trying to predict whether every single person is going to want it before I allow it into the catalogue.
But with myself, suddenly I’m doing market research on every thought before I let it leave my body.
Maybe, just maybe, this is a bit too much. Maybe I talk about too many things. Maybe they liked when I talked about this, so I should only talk about this now. Maybe this doesn’t fit. Maybe I should save this one. Maybe people are going to think, why is she talking about that?
Who cares?
Seriously. Who cares?
become the distribution center
If I am actually a distribution center, then the whole way I think about expression has to change.
A distribution center is not somewhere people come and decide whether the center itself deserves to exist. The point is that there are things moving through it.
And I think I’ve spent too much time thinking of myself like a store. Like I’m standing behind a counter hoping somebody walks in and likes what I put on the shelves. So every decision becomes about the customer. Is this what they want? Is this what they expect? Is this consistent with what they bought last time?
But I’m not a store. I’m the distribution center. That’s a completely different relationship with what’s inside of me.
Now the question is not, Will everybody like this?
The question is, Does this need somewhere to go?
Because if it does, then let it go.
Put it somewhere.
Let the person who needs it find it.
(sometimes) nobody is coming to approve you
And I think this applies to so much more than posting online. There are people who have been thinking about applying for something for so long that the application period has opened and closed twice. People thinking about starting a business. Thinking about moving. Thinking about changing careers. Thinking about making the thing. Thinking about telling somebody how they feel. Thinking about wearing the clothes or hair color and style they actually like. Thinking about becoming the person they already know they want to be.
And the entire time they’re asking questions that sound responsible but are really just different versions of, Who is going to approve this?
Sometimes nobody.
Sometimes nobody is coming.
Sometimes you’re the person who has to decide.
And I think that’s probably one of the scarier realizations of adulthood. You can spend your entire life wanting freedom and then finally get enough of it to realize that freedom means there’s nobody standing there giving you the correct answer anymore.
You have to create the system.
You have to decide what matters.
You have to decide what counts.
You have to decide when enough thinking is enough thinking.
And yes, you might make the wrong decision sometimes. You’re probably going to, a lot. But I would rather make a decision and learn something than sit in the same exact place for three years having increasingly sophisticated thoughts about what I might do and how I might do it.
At some point, thinking becomes procrastination. At some point, you have gathered enough information. At some point, you already know what you think. At some point, the only information left is on the other side of doing it.
the door probably isn’t even locked
That’s what I was really realizing while I was sitting there trying to plan content. I was trying so hard to manage the output that I had accidentally turned expression into another approval system.
And I don’t want to live like that. Why? What’d I do to deserve that? There’s too much inside of me.
There are too many things I care about, too many things I am building, too many thoughts I am still figuring out in real time. I don’t want to spend my life turning all of that into something small enough and neat enough that nobody could possibly misunderstand it.
I would rather distribute it. Somebody will want the vase. Somebody will hate the vase. Somebody isn’t looking for a vase at all.
None of that changes the fact that the vase deserved to make it into the catalogue.
So I think that’s the system now. If there’s something inside of me that wants to move, I am going to try to stop standing in front of the exit interrogating it. I can let it go. I can see what happens. I can make another thing tomorrow.
You think too much, and that is your prison.
The door is probably not even locked.
May grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen.
Xoxo,
Zozo