For many of us, writing and creating isn't a choice: It's a need.

There's this painfully romanticized notion about artists that comes from the collective conscious.

It's this idea that artists are wired to starve. To hustle. To be obsessive. Overly sensitive. Overly emotional.

Agoraphobic.

Introverted.

Needy.

Depressive.

Insomniacs.

Unorganized.

Outcasts.

Addicts.

Unlovable.

Crazy.

Unpredictable.

Lost.

If you find yourself believing that these things are true, or acceptable, then it's time to set that bullshit aside.

We live in a world that doesn't facilitate our inner creative, innovative, or individualistic needs. It's an old-school industrial economy model that rids us of our creative brilliance from an early age.

It makes us fearful of being creative and one-of-a-kind due to anything outside of the populous being deemed different, strange, or weird.

It teaches us to chase trends and the fantastical bliss that viral attention and money could one day bring us, rather than focus on the healing and love that individual artistic expression could bring into our present moment and fuel our inner well.

If we are to look beneath the veil of that fantasy for "making it" and acquiring extraordinary riches, we'll likely find that it's a subconscious yearning for having the time and space to express and discover our individual selves.

It's a repressed itch that isn't being scratched, and a result of the pain we feel by performing for collective, mass-society entities that do not align with our inner need-states.

This process others us, isolates us, and is responsible for that long list of tropes at the top of the post. As well as the idea that hyper-sensitivity is a weakness, rather than a strength.

We need to build a society that nurtures the individual.

A society that celebrates and cherishes the weird, the unseen, and the Other.

There is a unique gift inside all of us. And if we can create an ecosystem in which we nurture the individual vs. the entity, we can collectively unleash a Pandora's box of brilliance, love, and togetherness.

Together we can share our gifts and make this planet the utopia it is capable of being.