You’re allowed to make something bad
There is a strange pressure that comes with being creative. We are supposed to make something beautiful. Something useful. Something worth keeping. If we are sharing it online, it would look good in a photograph. If we are selling it, it needs to be good enough for someone else to spend their money on it. Even when we are making something purely for ourselves, there can be a little voice asking: “But what are you going to do with it?” Perhaps we need to get better at making things that are simply… bad. Not deliberately bad, necessarily. Just without worrying whether they are any good at all. Pick up a paintbrush and use the colours that don’t work together. Draw something with wonky lines. Start a piece of crochet and realise you’ve counted the stitches wrong. Make a felted animal with one ear slightly bigger than the other. Tear a piece of paper and stick it somewhere that doesn’t quite look right. And then leave it. You don’t have to fix it, you don’t have to photogr...