Why There Will Always Be People Who Don’t Understand Your Creative Life – And That’s Okay! #Writer #Creatives

This can be a tough one to accept.

If you are a creative person there will always be people in your life who will never:

Understand why you spend hours, days, months, years working on the same story.
Understand why you read so many books a week.
Share your creative enthusiasm for your creative projects.
Understand why you’re cartwheeling around the garden after receiving one tiny sentence of positive feedback.
Understand your weird and wonderful creative ways.
Be able to relate to the buzz you get inside when your blog post is being shared or liked.

These are the ones who say stuff like “I don’t understand why have you just spent your whole day rewriting a paragraph…I mean who does that?”

And

“Why are you sat at the kitchen table crying over 157 words?”

Their lack of understanding doesn’t mean they are bad or cruel. They are not out to get you. You just have different interests and are motivated by different things. It is as simple as that.

No matter how many hours you spend trying to explain your creative tendencies to them…

“I need you to understand something, writing makes me goofy happy. You also make me happy, maybe not goofy happy but a different form of happy.” *awkward face*

Or, excitedly gush about your latest project…

“This story kept me awake all night. At 3am I got up and started writing. All my characters started talking to me and then my bladder got excited too so there I was running back and forth from the loo with a head full of plots and stuff.”

They will still cast you a puzzled or horrified look.

If we were all the same life would be pretty dull.

Here are some things to consider when accepting that there will always be some people will never understand your creative life:

As a creative person you will always be a mystery to some people. This is actually a good thing and you should always strive to remain a mystery. Keeps people guessing about what you will do next.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. You can’t force others to like what you are doing or what you have created.
Each one of us has different talents and skills to offer the world. As Walt Whitman said we are all here to ‘contribute a verse’.  Being creative (either through writing, blogging, podcasting etc) is your way of contributing a verse. These people are also contributing a verse in their own special way.
If you are a true creative person (i.e. not doing it for the money or future fame) then you will know that your creative side is a huge part of who you are as a person. It’s not something you can change or switch off and anyway why would you?
According to this article Neuroscience confirms that highly creative people think and act differently than the average person. Our brains are hardwired in a unique way! This means that some people are going to think we are from another planet.
Being misunderstood comes with the territory of leading a creative life.
There is a place in the world for all of us.

In my experience those who don’t get your creative ways at first eventually come to accept them. Bizarrely they can actually turn into your biggest supporters.

The sooner you accept that not everyone in your life is going to understand your creative life the better!

So, stop getting stressed over them not understanding why you have spent the entire day staring blankly at your fourth chapter.

Focus your energies on returning to that fourth chapter and spending the rest of the week trying to work out what’s wrong with it