So me filming this marks the start of an experiment.

An experiment to share my thoughts in an uncensored way. And it’s interesting because even as I hit record and start filming this, the question that comes up is why? Why are you doing this? And I also hear a voice of:

Why do you think your thoughts are worthy? Why should you sit here and just share what you’re thinking in any given moment and your thoughts on certain themes or topics or whatever feels relevant?

And on one hand, I can hear this whole narrative beginning, justifying this expression, this method. There’s a reason and how it will help other people. But I don’t want to buy into that narrative. And instead I want to answer the question of “why?” with “why not?”

Especially, I suppose, because for me, I have ideas all the time have I feel like I have so much to say.

And often I keep it to myself. I let those ideas just swirl around my brain and I don’t publish and I want to change that. And the reason I want to change that is part of this creative experiment, part of me believes that expression is incredibly important for our wellness. And I know wellness is a bit of a weird word now, and it’s sort of been hijacked and commoditised and commercialised, but I don’t believe that doesn’t make it true.

And I think it’s really important as well, when you are a business owner…

(I feel hesitancy here because part of me is like, I want to make this for everybody. But my experience is that I am a business owner and one of the things that I have to do is create content regularly to market my services.)

In all honesty, I could try to dress this whole experiment up as spreading the message or whatever…but as a business, we need to make money and what I find is that there are thoughts in my mind that I want to share, but I stop myself because it doesn’t make strategic sense.

And what happens is that I inherently judge the value of an idea based on how worthy I think it is in terms of how much money it might potentially make me. And I want to move away from that because creativity is important to me.

I actually believe the meaning of life is to create. I believe every single individual’s purpose on this planet is one of creation.

And I’m not talking all like, you know “religion” as in “The Almighty Creator”. I’m not talking about creating other life, although for some that might be how our desire to create manifests. But I think to be human is to be creative. And when we suppress that urge within ourselves because it doesn’t look or feel a certain way, we censor ourselves and we stifle our creativity.

And I think the funny thing is about creativity is that we don’t know whether it’s going to be the best thing in the world or the worst thing in the world until we hit publish or until we actually release it, until we let it live and exist in whatever form that it wants to, whether it’s speaking like this, sharing thoughts, whether it’s through artwork, creating paintings or sculptures, whether it’s through dance, whether it’s through conversation with another human, whether it’s through writing. I don’t believe any form of creation trumps any other form.

But I think when we stifle that urge that we have within us, we stifle our life force. And I know that sounds like “meh”… I do hear it at the same time as I speak it! And I don’t want to get into too much of a spiritual, weird space where you are resistant to hearing what I’m saying because of the language that I’m using but this is my vocabulary. This is how things want to be expressed through me. So I will honour that.

Also, to honour the pauses. As you no doubt have noticed from watching this. My intention is not to edit any of these videos because I believe the pauses are just as important as the expression. I believe in those pauses.

That’s where we create space within ourselves for new ideas to form.

And I think we need to get comfortable with pauses because pauses and gaps are part of the creative process. And when we edit things and when we cut out the stumbles or tighten things up for the sake of YouTube algorithms, I believe we are actually missing out on an important part of the process.

And I actually it’s creating a false narrative that shows or that implies that we need to get things perfect for them to be valuable. I’d just inherently disagree with that. I believe there is value in whatever we create, even if it’s imperfect, even if it’s rubbish, even if we watch it back and cringe, which I imagine I would probably do if I watched this back.

But welcome to my experiment. I suppose I’m part of this is showing myself primarily this is for myself first, before it’s for anybody else. And if we come back to my initial question of why are you doing this?

Well, why not?

I want to show myself and maybe show others that things don’t need to make sense before we act, that we can follow our urges and not need to know whether they make strategic sense, not need to know how it’s going to end up before we decide to create anyway.

Particularly being a woman with a business, so much of what I do is calculated and strategic because as I mentioned, you run a business, you got to make money. And I don’t want this to be that. I want to let a little bit more chaos in. I suppose I want to stop trying to control everything because it’s exhausting and in trying to control things, I also believe I’m limiting myself.

So I’m going to let this be whatever it’s going to be and we’ll see where it goes.