You are allowed to think anything you want

You are allowed to think anything you want.

You don’t have to think you’re a failure because you didn’t book the job
You don’t have to think writing is hard because you’d rather watch Netflix
You don’t have to think the life of an artist is a struggle because there’s a dominant narrative that supports that belief
Or that you’re not creative because you don’t fit society’s mold for what an artist looks like

You don’t have to believe your age is working against you or keeping you from pursuing your dreams
You don’t have to believe you are required to shrink your body to succeed in the entertainment industry
Or that you have to be born with connections to get your story made
Or that you haven’t created enough or have wasted time
Or that society’s expectations of you have any impact on your intrinsic value
Or that you require anything but what you have, right now, to reach your audience.

You can believe that the only way to fail is to stop learning, and that you only stop learning when you stop breathing
That making art is the easiest thing in the world
That we are born with an impulse to create, and that all the brain chatter that gets in the way of us realizing that is just misguided noise
That you are worthy whether you create or not
That your body is a gift, exactly as it is, and that your duty as an artist is to tell the truth as embodied by your unique brain, your skin, your contours, your fascinations

You can believe that now is the perfect time for you to tell a story, any story
Or a random collection of images or sounds
And that your voice has value simply because it is yours, and you are a human on this planet and that is enough

And all we are charged to do as artists, as humans, is to share our humanity, and the magic of being human is that by doing so we connect people to *their* humanity

And that we do that by connecting to ourselves
Our voices
Our ideas
Our imagination

You don’t have to believe what you were taught, especially when what you were taught promotes hiding.

You can choose to believe literally anything about art, yourself, your capacity to create.

All this and more is available to you.