How To Get Things Off Your Chest

Practice Any Art

TL;DR: I thought I was set. Health, relationships, money – all good. On paper, I was thriving. In reality, I something was missing. Turns out, contentment without creation isn’t peace; it’s stagnation.

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All the surface-level self-improvement advice –exercise, eat clean, touch grass, maintain friendships– only goes so far.

There was a pressure building behind my eyes, a static hum of anxiety I couldn’t articulate. It wasn’t until I started writing that the picture became clear.

I recently came across a Vonnegut passage, read aloud by Ian McKellen (aka Gandalf) in a speech, that’s been rattling around in my head. He talks about practicing art “not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming – to make your soul grow.“

So let’s talk about it.

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The 90/10 Problem

The internet is a library where 90% of the people never open their mouths. Maybe 10% –if that– are actually making things, putting thoughts onto the shelves.

We are living through a bizarre physiological experiment. We consume 100 times more information than we output. We gorge on podcasts, doom-scroll threads, and binge documentaries until our mental hard drives are red-lining.

We are gluttonous information piggies. We fill our brains until they burst, but we never open the valve.

We need an outlet to get things off our chest, to use what we consume for something bigger than ourselves. This isn’t about audience building. This is about metabolic survival. You have to exhale.

Source

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My Pensieve

I treat my Substack like Dumbledore’s Pensieve – that magical basin where he siphons off excess memories to examine them later. (First Gandalf, now Dumbledore? Apparently, my coping mechanism is “Wizard Wisdom.”)

It’s my own little corner of the internet where I dump my thoughts. Not primarily for an audience, but for myself. Having it read by strangers is a side effect. (I wrote about this tension before – the midwit bell curve applies here too.)

More on that here.

• Thinking in private is easy; you can lie to yourself in a journal.

• But thinking in public forces a terrifying kind of honesty.

The possibility of being seen –however remote– activates a high bar I otherwise wouldn’t hold myself to.

And honestly? Vomiting my thoughts onto the internet has been the only thing that quiets the noise. I write when I feel like I have something to say. Few things have been as rewarding as watching the chaos in my head become sentences.

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Creation & Catharsis

In The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin (who looks like and might as well be a wizard himself 🧙‍♂️) describes creativity as a kind of tuning. There’s a signal trying to pass through you, and your job is to clear the channel.

Fear blocks it. Perfectionism blocks it. Caring too much about what happens after you make the thing blocks it.

“The audience comes last,” he writes. Not because the audience doesn’t matter, but because thinking about them too early corrupts the signal. You start making what you think they want instead of what’s actually trying to come through.

The work is the practice. The practice is the point. The product is a byproduct.

This is the permission we all need: we’re not trying to be artists. We’re trying to let something out.

“Practice any art — music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage — no matter how well or badly.

Not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming. To find out what’s inside you. To make your soul grow.” — Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

When you create something –anything– you reclaim a piece of your autonomy.

It doesn’t matter if you’re wailing off-key in the shower, writing terrible poetry in a notebook no one will read, or taking blurry photos of your dog.

The act itself is the reward. You are exercising a muscle that modern life has let atrophy. You are releasing the pressure. You are finally putting something back out into the world – even if that world is just you, alone in your room at 2 AM.

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You Can Just Do Things

Don’t overcomplicate it. Just do something. Anything.

The first time I published something on Substack, my mouse hovered over “Publish” for ten minutes like it was a nuclear launch button. It was 500 words about literally nothing. It had 4 views, one of which was my mum. And something in my chest loosened.

The valve had finally opened.

It doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be seen. It just has to come out.

Once you start, you can’t imagine living any other way. You’ll wonder how you went so long just consuming, consuming, consuming – never letting anything out.

What happens if you don’t? The pressure keeps building. You keep scrolling, filling yourself up with other people’s thoughts.

And that nameless dissatisfaction you feel? That low-level hum of anxiety? That isn’t boredom. It’s spiritual constipation.

You are full. Start pouring something out.

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