SPIRITUAL SOAP: I Found Creative Freedom for $10 and a Lie
Becoming the frog that escapes their boiling fate.
Before we were The Black Sheep, we were a newsletter named Spiritual Soap. Please enjoy this article from our history!
This is the first edition in a series exploring creative freedom. Paid subscribers will receive each full-length edition on creative freedom, starting with this origin story and moving on to more technical, pragmatic explorations.
I’d love for you to join along.
Every one of my quotes you scroll past, every one of my sentences you skim is the result of a painful, prolonged labor. My creative process requires a scalpel and many hours to find a heart for the same reason much of what our culture makes now doesn’t have heart. For a creation to come alive, it must have the kind of electricity that only something genuine can spark.
An entire life can lack electricity. Most of my life has been spent doing exactly what kills your spark: aiming for acceptance from others, or at least avoiding criticism.
Chasing acceptance will slowly transform you into an unsightly mutant, a Frankenstein-esque concoction of all the different elements you think other people want.
Someone should start us all off in life with a stern explanation about how little you know about yourself and what you think you want. The tricky thing is that you can get far in life as a mutant; most people are too busy developing their own mutations to pay attention to yours. Some industries prefer mutants on staff: academia, HR-heavy offices, politics, pop culture. The less of you your employer has to deal with, the easier it is to opt for control as the key to success.
Other realms will punish you with ceaseless, confusing failure if you show up as a mutant. Relationships, parenting, entrepreneurship, and art all require the spark of authenticity for success.
If you try to Frankenstein yourself to perfection based on your presumptions about what someone wants, you’ll earn the horror-story ending you get.
“Don’t try to be liked by everyone” seems like an obvious idea for me to present as enlightening, but I didn’t claim to have a new idea, just a better way to understand an old one. I, too, grew up surrounded by construction paper stars with my name on them in grade school. I received all the right messaging for learning to be myself above all, yet I only learned it a few years ago.
You know the line about frogs sitting still in boiling water, but I like to imagine there are some frogs that escape. Most doomed frogs can’t perceive the increasing heat until it’s too late, but there’s got to be a frog that suddenly gets it—he has a froggy epiphany, feels the heat, and jumps to freedom. Maybe that’s just the story I’d prefer.
The frog’s salvation might be fantasy, but yours isn’t.