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An Open Thank You To Any and All Creators

To anyone to makes anything--writers, artists, musicians, composers, sculptors, singers, directors, actors, any and all types of creators I send a deep, heartfelt "Thank You" for doing what you do.

Even if you never show the world. Even if you're a million book selling author. Even if you think it's terrible. Even if you're ashamed and embarrassed by your work.

THANK YOU.

Thank you for making it. Thank you for putting your heart out, outside your hidden self, and on paper or canvas or a screen. In stone, or clay, or air.

Thank you for the bravery it took to get there.

Thank you for the time it took to structure your thoughts and prepare your mind to try and impress your design onto your medium.

Thank you.

Maybe you never show anyone. Maybe you showed your most trusted person and you became heart broken. Maybe you showed a bunch of people and they all rejected it. Maybe they LOVED IT, but followed their golden praise that filled your heart and lifted it high was followed by poisoned words like "but you did ______ wrong. You should have done _____ instead of _______. You should have taken it this direction. You should have _______. *I* would have ________."

You don't owe them anything. You don't owe them an ending THEY want, or the colors THEY prefer, or the shapes THEY find pleasing. Create for yourself, from within yourself, by your own design. Make because you can, and because you want to, because you love. Make because you hate and you have to pour the poison out of you lest you succumb to it yourself. Forge and found, invent and shape. Keep doing it because it's what you do, because it contributes to the tapestry of life, even if you are the only one to see that contribution.

Thank you for doing it.

Creation--seen or unseen--changes the creator just a little bit. A small path to self-discovery or healing. Sometimes it's lancing a boil within. Sometimes it rings gloriously the entire time. Sometimes it's a dead, empty nothing. But it changes you, so it changes the world.

Thank You For Creating, and therefore changing the world.

Thank you for making it exactly the way YOU wanted. If it didn't come out the way you hoped, Thank You for trying, and please don't stop trying. If you failed completely and had to take it all back to the drawing board, Thank You for putting it out there in the first place. Remember that the from the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success. If it came out exactly the way you hoped it would, and was a smashing success--just to you, or to an audience, or to the world, Thank You.

It's easy for someone outside yourself to find faults or flaws in something they did not emotionally birth. It's easy for them to critique it and tear it apart and analyze all the tiny pieces. They did not build it. Destruction is so much easier than creation. They didn't pour part of themselves into it. They absorbed part of Your Heart into their lives.

Maybe you wrote something and they went along for the ride and read it. Maybe they read it 10,000 times over because some part of it resonated with them. Maybe they eagerly ripped the final few pages from your hands and ran away squealing with joy to finally know How It Ends. Maybe their squeals of joy became shrieks of rage and indignation as they saw your work to the end with you. Maybe they got caught up with what was important to them, what they related to, and missed your true story. Maybe that hurt you. A lot. Or at least a lot more than you expected. Maybe you're a time-hardened veteran Creator and have become so calloused by your audiences reactions that you expected no different.

I Am So Sorry.

It hurts my heart that an audience can't set aside their own expectations and just enjoy what you've made. That they can't just be happy for how it touched them, weep for the ways it moved them, appreciate the new or different ways it caused them to view life and art. That they can't just love it how you made it, and keep in the forefront of their minds the ways it enhanced their lives.

I ache for you, on your behalf. I rage and rail and rant for you, quietly, to myself, at the heartlessness of a community so changeable. Because how I feel, or how they feel isn't the point. It never was. It was about how YOU felt when you found this inside you, and how you felt as you released it into the world.

Maybe that's wrong of me, because maybe YOU aren't hurt. Maybe I'm overreacting. Maybe in writing all this, I'm making it about me and not you. If I've lost the true thread of my letter, I'm sorry.

Still, Thank You. A Million Times, I Thank You.

I hope with all my being that any outcries against you or the hatchling ideas from that beautiful brain of yours bounce off your ears. Do not let them lodge themselves in your heart or take root in the fertile soil of your creative being. Do not give someone elses unworthy opinion the space to grow into some strangling vine that stunts your expression. They do not know the You who made this. They cannot. They can only see fragments through the window of your creation. Do not dwell on those criticisims weigh on your soul the next time you pick up a pen or brush, the next time you raise your voice in song, reach for a keyboard, or turn on your metronome.

You do not create FOR ME, even if I have access to your creation. You built this your way, by your handbook, in your brain, with your dreams and ideas, and I was lucky enough to be able to be part of it.

Thank You, From The Bottom Of My Heart, To All Creators. You make this world a world worth living in.