Let It Get Messy: What Happens When You Finally Let Go in Your Creative Process and in Life…

One of the hardest things I’ve had to learn to do as an artist is to let the work get messy.

That means rolling with unformed ideas and seeing where the process takes me, experimenting with colors, creating designs that look more doodle than “professional,” and removing all judgment around the finished product.

For the longest time, the pressure to be perfect held me back. Sometimes it even kept me from starting. I’d sit frozen in front of a blank canvas or with a felting needle in hand, and instead of creating, I’d walk away. My creative energy would stall, and that small, nagging voice would whisper, “How can you call yourself an artist if it’s not perfect?”

It took me a long time to realize that perfectionism wasn’t protecting my creativity — it was smothering it.

Embracing Your Inner Child

Only when I started letting go did I finally see growth. I stepped into my own as an artist and, for the first time, felt confident calling myself one.

How did I get there? By reconnecting with my younger self.

I thought back to how, as a kid and teenager, I spent hours writing stories, drawing, painting, and singing without shame. I used my imagination freely, without worrying about how it would be received. I did what made me happy, what brought me joy.

Children create without fear. They don’t overthink or second-guess. To a child, anything feels possible, but somewhere along the way to adulthood, we lose that. And it’s so important we find that again.

The Power of Play

There is growth in letting yourself just be. Just play. Just create for the sake of creating.

Whether it’s for a living or purely for fun, play is where growth happens in life. Tune out the noise of all those pesky “shoulds”: It should be perfect. It should look realistic. You’re an adult; you should be serious.

Let it all go. Write a silly poem. Draw while your mind wanders and see what ends up on the page. Create something with whatever material you have in front of you purely because it makes you feel something.

It’s healing to let go, and freeing to realize how little the outcome matters. Growth comes from the messy, uncertain parts of life, and of art.

Giving Yourself Permission

Every time I sit down to create, I remind myself: it doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be mine — and that’s exactly what younger me would have wanted.

Because when you give yourself permission to play, experiment, and make “mistakes,” you rediscover what drew you to art in the first place: the joy of simply creating.

So, however you make art, I hope you remember that your creativity doesn’t have to be perfect to be meaningful. The act of creating is the art — messy, alive, and entirely your own.

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