When I HATE Being Creative
As in, when I am working on my own website
As a long overdue aspect of being more serious as a creative/artist, I am finally putting up my website. I have put it off because there are so many aspects of it that I just hate. Picking out a host, learning their creation tools, remapping my domain to a new service, uploading images, all that stuff. Those are some of the reasons that I put this process off… but really, they are all just inconveniences compared to the REAL reason I still don’t have a site. The real reason is this… I HATE when I have to be creative on the spot.
Maybe “on the spot” is not the perfect term… what I hate is when I have a thing that I have to create, and it will be out there in the public eye and it will not only be connected to me, but it will represent me and I have to create it with a tool that is not my preferred medium. I have to use a generic website authoring tool to create a series of pages that represent who I am to someone who clicks on a link and hope to convey myself in the right way so that they may be interested in pursuing what I have to offer.
Now, I am not opposed to “putting myself out there,” nor am I opposed to doing a little marketing! I am ok putting myself up in front of others and blowing myself up like one of those brightly colored, inflatable arm-waving, compressor driven noodle boys that you see in front of car dealerships. I have even gotten to the point where I am willing to put a painting I created or book I have written in front of a stranger and saying, “I did this, and it is awesome!” What I do not like is trying to do that when I don’t have the tools I need to do a good job!
Now, I need to point out that the platform I have chosen for my site, Webador, is an amazing host and has some truly powerful tools for creating your own website. They really are intuitive and even the process of transferring my domain was easy on their end (the previous holder of my domain will not be mentioned in this article because I listened to my mom when she said, “if you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t name check them in your Substack post”). They are not the problem. I am the problem.
So, it’s great to know what the problem is and all (yeah, it’s me, we got that established) the question at this point is, “What do I do about it?”
I could ignore the issue, not publish my website, and just go on trying to let people know about what I am working on through Instagram or in person. Unfortunately, this has been the status quo for a while now, and… it sucks. I really need to create a single location I can send people who might be interested in what I do.
I could try to get someone else to do it for me. If I am going to be honest here, this is not an issue. Not that there are not numerous people out there i the world that are not better than I am at doing this, but because I am a control freak when it comes to how I am portrayed and I want to be in charge of this. Also, I am super cheap and don’t have the overhead to pay for a someone else to do good job.
Finally, I could always push through, do the best I can and realize that this is not permanent, and I can go back at any time and make changes to my site if I find something is not working or I think of a better way to use the tools as I learn them. Yeah… when I type that all out, it seems like this is a pretty good solution.
It makes me think, how often does my perfectionism or need to control an outcome prevent me from trying? I am going to spend some time looking at other times in my life that I have been challenged by something that I was not 100% about. In those cases, could I have given it my best, and would that have been ok? Are there things still hanging out, incomplete because I could not do it perfectly?
Can I be a better creative by pushing through the boundaries of perfectionism or lack of control and “just getting something done” rather than freezing? Yeah. Pretty sure that is the message here… Time to go hit that Publish button!
To that end, please swing by my site www.aaroninspired.com and let me know what you think!
Congrats Aaron!