Everyone who has been overtaken with a passion to do well in a creative field knows the struggle. What you’re doing isn’t important. It doesn’t make enough money. It serves no real function. 

My husband is obsessed with cooking shows, chefs, exotic food, etc. And today while I was executing the ever-exuberant task of folding clean laundry, I thought to myself, “You know what? I could use some background chatter in the key of Dave Chang.” So I turned on his Netflix Original, Ugly Delicious. 

I can’t really think of a better title for his show, nor a better title for the creative process itself. Every time I watch a documentary about some other expert in a field other than writing, I’m struck by the commonalities, by the way they’re so inspiring to a writer even though their field affects completely different senses.

How many of us have taken what those who have come before us have handed down and tried to make it our own? How many of us have shunned what we knew growing up, only to come back to that very thing when we were older and wiser? How many of us have studied how our own passions have influenced or recorded history?

How many of us, at the later stages of our process, are discovering that we’re actually late to the party?

It doesn’t matter what the creative outlet is, we all seem to suffer from the same maladies: We want to change the world. We want to inform the next generation. We want to tell stories that matter.

And the next generation is looking up at us and saying, “We got this. Go to sleep, it’s past your bedtime.”