Childlike Self

As adults, we’ve been trained to look at other people’s successes, and care about what other people think. It’s an evolutionary construct that’s supposed to push us to become better people. Most of the time, however, it gets in the way of personal evolution and growth.

This matters the most with creative activities, such as drawing, painting, and songwriting. If you allow your comparisons between you and other creatives, it can be paralyzing. It can also stop you from making your best work because, instead of being yourself and focusing on you, you’ll be focusing on everyone else out there. That deters your art from being honest. You can only create honest art if you’re honest with yourself. 

This is where bringing out, and becoming, your childlike self comes in.

When we’re children, especially little, we don’t care about what other people think. We haven’t learned to yet. Everything we do, we do because we love it. We haven’t learned the difference between ‘good’ or ‘bad’ art yet, nor have we found what makes us, us. Everything we do, everything we love, and everything we are comes from a place of innocence. Even our belief systems come from a place of innocence.

When we become adults, that place of innocence disappears.

A part of that place of innocence is the ability to not care what people think, and to be as odd and as free as little kids can be.

Allowing yourself to create can only happen once you’ve released your adult fears from yourself, and embraced the part of yourself that didn’t know any better, the part of you that created because they wanted to. 

It’s about tapping into, and listening to, your inner child. It’s about having your inner child and the adult you’re become meet, and denying neither of them. Your inner child is the human you were before you began listening to what other people thought, believed, and wanted for you. It’s the part that remembered to dream, never feeling guilty for doing so. An inner child is that pure, innocent part of you that listened to their own dreams rather than anyone else’s opinions.

Your inner adult is the logical, analytical part of you. It’s the part that left innocence behind and had begun to listen to everyone else’s opinions, the news, and those normalcies of adulthood that make dreaming next to impossible. It’s the part that’s learned to focus too much on what is believed to be their place in the world, rather than where they want to be.

The adult side of you most likely either forgets to dream…

… or, feels guilty doing so.

You’ve probably seen or heard of the journaling prompt where the self you are now writes to your past self. This prompt has been everywhere from trending on Twitter to being a Pinterest pin to being a prompt in a physical journal-writing book.

However, I’m going to invert it, and ask you to think, just for a moment, that you’re your childhood self. A good age would be between ages five and seven. Write  a letter or dialogue between that self and the self you are now. Remember what you used to love to do, and have them tell you all the dreams you either used to have, or allow them to encourage you to do what you want to do.

Now, how did they do it?

No, children at this age don’t tend to be excellent at the arts, but if you look at old work from that age, you might find qualities of it that could have, and would have, evolved into a talent.

If you tell yourself, “I can’t draw,” “I can’t write,” “I can’t sing,” or anything else amongst those lines, you’re thinking with your adult brain and not allowing your inner child through.

A child practices creativity and creative endeavors because they want to. They enjoy it. They’re not afraid if it’s good or bad, and haven’t learned to care or think that way, yet.

Creativity can’t be good or bad. It’s subjective, so the fears we gain as adults are just fears. And, as any trepidation, they can be overcome.

Allow your inner child to help you overcome your anxiety about dreaming, creativity, and the arts. Allow your inner adult to work with your inner child. Don’t shy away from the absurd. A child wouldn’t. They’d embrace it.

Allow both parts of you to help each other find your genres, your mediums, and the creative meanings behind what you do. It won’t only help with your art and creativity, it’ll also help with self esteem associated with who you are. Allow that part of you to breathe, and breathing will become easier.