How young thug reminded me why I love creating

Your best ideas come to you in the doing -- not overplanning

@sarayukiko

I used to be so nervous that I might never write anything I liked again. That my best work might be behind me. Or perhaps, any new writing that happened, I would have to hide and keep safe, because another great line might not come for a very long time. I’d have to be sure I kept them for the right moment.

I’ve stopped believing in that.

Oddly, an interview about Young Thug changed my perspective.

I can’t even remember who said it, it was a video that I happened upon on one of my timelines. I’m paraphrasing, but he said something like “Young Thug could rap about anything. He could rap about floors and make it sound like a hit.”

Those words circled my mind like hawks. He could rap about floors and make it sound like a hit….

Well, what even makes a hit?

I think it’s some force that wraps around the song that decides that it wants to be heard. The deliverer of that song, has instilled inside of them, a type of purpose. Young Thug has the intuitive ability to warp over a beat with incredible finesse, play, and charm. There’s something innately working inside of him that lends him to the rap-making process. Something in his natural cadence that gives him the ability to transform a mundane sentence into a hook-worthy lyric. When he creates a hit song, it’s not an accident, it’s in the design of how he manipulates the material of spoken word.

What a generous view of creativity this is. It’s not the songs themselves, that make Young Thug incredible, it’s his action of transforming the world through his creativity. His output is not finite. It is endless.

It made me think of my own process in writing. If I compared my relationship with writing, to that of Young Thug’s with rapping, how can my perspective of my process change?

Well, I thought about those things, and it changed everything.

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February rushed in like a blink. I can’t believe it’s almost over. Next week is my birthday and the past weeks have called in a type of reckoning with myself. I’ve been having meetings with myself. I’ve cried to myself. I’ve scolded myself. I’ve belittled myself. But, after the aeration of these terrible feelings, a cool near-spring wind occurred, rattling me clean. I grew insights. I grew proud. I looked at where I was last year and now only compare myself to that version. I’m not looking to my left or my right. I’m just looking back and then looking forward. I find it’s important to oscillate between the two.

I had a major revelations — but here’s the thing with revelations, I don’t think they come out of nowhere. I think you have to set yourself up to receive them. It was a domino effect of items I did that allowed me such a wash of a stunning reframed perspective.

And you know what I did?

I watched movies about love and youth. I took long walks in the sun and had no fixed destination. I cooked for myself, many meals, and touched the fruits at farmers markets. I began to forgive myself. I began to ask the question, “If I were to die tomorrow, would I have felt that I lived enough of my life? Would I be proud of the decisions I made?”

Immediately, I pushed an answer of “No! Of course I would not be PROUD of myself, there’s still so much left I have to do!!!! I have barely scratched the surface of my life!”

But, as I continued to sit, I realized that voice was a lie. That wasn’t actually what I believed. So, instead, as I sat at my kitchen table, I waited and listened for another voice. A softer voice that is often spoken over. When I tuned into that voice and it began to grow faintly louder, it told me something else.

“Yes, I would be proud of my life. I would be proud of the person I had become. How I loved the sunlight and music and I found some way to wrap my feelings through text. All of that would be enough. Even though it would be tragic to have my life cut short, I would be proud that I made even these milestones. That it’s not money or fame that I am really after as an artist. It is a connection to my own life.”

A forgiveness rushed inside of me and a new understanding began to flicker and reveal. I had been listening to the wrong voice.

Well, if the right voice valued time, health, honoring the earth's beauty, and being touched by art — those would be the things I would need to do to feed it, right? That would be my connection to my greatest life.

So, as I filled my schedule with activities in these categories, I started to grow a resolve within myself. I decided to plunge back into the writing process of my book.

That’s when I thought about Young Thug.

If he transformed everything he touched with his natural hit-making, maybe the same could apply to me with poetic prose. If that is the language I speak — if I just sit and write about anything, perhaps something beautiful will come out of it, because I am always seeking beautiful things. It is the reason I began writing. It is why I love writing. Because I get to watch the world transform when I place words upon it. When I try my best to describe what it feels like to be here — an alive, confused, and in awe human being running through her life. If I just keep trying, maybe even just for myself, I will enjoy this process of the world transforming itself inside of my text.

So, this time with my book I wouldn’t have the end in mind — I would solely be focused on my process. I finagled sentences from previous drafts, as well as inspired scribblings of poetic thoughts, and I began to observe, at large, my technique with writing. My writing is very immersive. Words come to me and then I funnel inside and between them. It is between the words that gusts of ideas open. Which then, over time, leads to a swelling completion of an entire story. The ideas come to me in the doing. Not when I’m pacing in my room, forcing myself to come to terms with an ending. My ideas come in the doing. So, quite frankly, I’m not supposed to know how my book is going to go. I’m actually supposed to discover it in the process. It is a fundamental design of my writing practice. Thinking so much about a cohesive ending for my book has stalled me for years, when that is not where my focus should lie. My relationship with writing lies in the discovery.

If you think about it, it’s not so different from life at large. Yes, think of your desired outcomes, but for the most part, it is when you are in the moment of what you are doing that you will most understand what you truly want next.

Get out of your head and into the creation of your life. It is inside of the process, inside of the living, that you will make your breakthroughs.