INTRODUCTION

For as long as I can remember I always wanted to be an Artist.

As a kid I’d fill notebooks and sketchbooks with reckless abandon (nothing’s changed there). I’d cut up magazines and paste the clippings together to create my very own magazine, exactly how I wanted it to be. I’d slice the limbs off my Barbie dolls and turn them into necklaces, sew my own dresses from vintage cartoon bed sheets, and, as bizarrely obsolete as this may now sound, I fell in love with telling strangers on the internet about it all through the ancient art of blogging.

I’m not quite sure how I mustered up the courage but I decided that I wanted to create as much of my life as possible. I figured, if all the pieces of what I want in my life already exist in someway, surely I can create and curate my own dream combination. And, over the years, the more I’ve thought about this and gradually built together the life I dreamed of, piece by piece, the more I realise that there are truly no-limits to what we are capable of creating. The ones who are crazy enough to ask for what they want are the ones who actually get it.

If you dream hard enough, take a few risks, and get stubborn as fuck with your vision, then it’s only a matter of time until you can sink your teeth into the life you crave.

Looking back I realise that fitting into the flow of what just-so-happened to already exist was never my jam. It’s like I could taste a life that would be a little juicier and I could hardly wait to create it for myself. I watched Cribs and thought “fuck a white picket fence.” I listened to College Dropout on a CD walkman that skipped when I stepped too hard and felt my self-esteem rise. I read Andy Warhol’s diary and saw girls get rich on the internet from sharing their outfits and I knew, this is my fucking time to shine.

I think I’m special, unique, entirely one-of-a-kind. And I think I’m exactly the same as every other weirdo with too many ideas and enthusiasm that most people don’t know what to do with and 24/7 access to unlimited wi-fi.

I am a Creatrix.

And you are, too.

That’s why you found me. That’s what compelled you to read these words.

You might not fully know and embody it just yet but what you are capable of creating is important. Not only because when you create the life and art you dream about, you enrich the world around you in both tiny and unthinkably large ways. But also because when you’re in that steamy delicious messy blur of creative flow, life is delicious.

Life is not a spectator sport. You’re not here to passively consume. You are here to create and contribute. You are here to pour out your guts in the most beautiful and ugly ways possible. You are here to live as yourself, not some watered-down version of whatever’s trending this week.

Life can feel really boring without a juicy project to obsess over. You know what I mean - when you have that sparkling feeling and you just have to figure it out. You have to make it real. The thrill of bringing this fantasy to life suddenly outweighs your fears and your doubts and you commit to the art.

Embodying your creative expression is a luxury. If you’re privileged enough to have even 20 minutes to exist in your own expression, you have to take it. Refuse to press snooze on who you came here to be. This is about you maintaining influence in your own life and on your own identity. You’re not settling to leave it up to chance. You are creating it all.

The whole fucking universe gets very turned on by a babe who knows what she wants and goes directly after it. Creatrixes enlist the universe as an on-going collaborator. Bold & unflinching. Confident in the knowledge that your success is inevitable because you have the ability to create it out of thin air.

You refuse to settle. Not only because you know, deep in your bones, that you are worthy of the very specific life you dream of. But also because you are aware that you are entirely capable of making all of it your reality. With an avalanche of cherries on top.

You don’t earn your titles. You choose them.

I was waiting for someone else to call me an artist.

“Maybe I need to go to art school if I ever wanna be legit.”

“Wait! First I need the approval of these 5 random people!”

“Only if I earn a certain amount of $$$.”

“When I’ve done this project or that collaboration or blah blah blah.”

These kind of looping limitations we place upon ourselves are really fucking boring.

I’m a big fan of breaking down our limitations, revealing them as the cowards they are, and replacing them entirely with beliefs that steer your actions directly towards your desires. I’m also a really big fan of getting so bored of a nagging negative belief that we decide to just drop it entirely, swivel on our heels, and march confidently in the opposite direction.

Refusing to call yourself an Artist until you’ve jumped through some arbitrary hoops is the most certain route you can take to never becoming an artist. While Upper Case “A” Artist is a noun; a kind of title that’s bestowed upon you by some other person or an institution. Lower Case “a” artist is a verb; it’s who you are because it’s what you do. Simply put, an artist makes art. And I, like so many others, felt too nervous to call myself an Artist, and I let that hold me back from ever seriously committing to making my art.

Psychologists have been researching how our self-identity informs our behaviour for decades. We tend to act in alignment with how we see ourselves. If you think of yourself as a lazy person, and tell that story to yourself over and over again, chances are you’ll find yourself taking less and less action. Whereas if you see yourself as someone who does the things you say you’re going to do, you’ll find it much easier to get moving because you haven’t created any internal friction between your beliefs and your behaviour.

If when you sit down to create you find your mind clouded with doubts, it’s going to be increasingly harder to create anything at all. Energy is finite. You simply can’t be wasting your resources worrying whether you’re “good enough” to make your art when you could be busy doing exactly that instead.

The energy that could be pulsing through you and flowing into your art is being drained by the leeches your insecurities breed. They ask: “what’s the point in what you’re creating anyway? who is gonna buy it? what will you do next? what if you don’t ever finish anything of purpose? what if you make it and no one even gives a shit?!” And on and on these thoughts can go.

And here’s the thing: these thoughts aren’t necessarily wrong. They’re not necessarily right either. As with anything, there is always the possibility to fail. With creativity, some degree of failure is guaranteed. It’s part of the process, but we’ll talk about that later.

There’s a story Jim Carrey told that you’ve also probably heard a hundred times now but it doesn’t even matter because every time it hits like a tonne of bricks.

Jim’s dad wanted to be a comedian. Instead he chose the “safe” option of becoming an accountant, a job he later got fired from leaving his family living out of their car. Instead of this “failure” leaving him terrified to go for his dream, it showed him that it was the most logical decision. Carrey said “you can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.”

Mic drop and the crowd goes wild.

Nothing is guaranteed. It is your choice whether you cave to your doubts. Tough love, I know. But it’s important that we remember nobody is gonna make your dreams come true for you. That’s on you, boo.

You could choose to crumble under the doubts, to stay small out of the fear of falling short. Or, you can decide to dive right in. To have passion frothing from your mouth. To commit with radical dedication because anything else won’t do and creatrixes don’t settle.

When you decide to stop worrying about whether you “have the right” to call yourself an artist yet and you start actually creating your art, that’s when thing’s shift.

You never wanted the title. You wanted the lifestyle.

You want to spend your days creating and soaking up inspiration. You want to make something with your ideas. That doesn’t require a certificate from an institution.

Take the shortcut and start acting like an artist.

You don’t have to worry about whether the title fits, you’ll already be doing the thing. Other people will see you as the artist you are. And, if you wanna add a little spice to it, you can start calling yourself a creatrix, too.

What the fuck is a creatrix?

After squealing with fear in Aiden’s upstate cabin, Carrie Bradshaw pointed to the windowsill and exclaimed, “a squirrel is just a rat in a cuter outfit!” That’s what a creatrix is to an artist.

The creatrix knows everything is available for transformation. They know they are in constant co-creation with the universe and they don’t take the opportunity lightly. A creatrix doesn’t just march to the beat of her own drum - she built the whole fucking drum kit. They value their ideas enough to make them real. Creatrixes dedicate their lives to becoming their own greatest masterpiece and know that absolutely nothing is off limits. Our art extends beyond our canvases and books and sculptures and gowns and dishes, and creeps into every pore of our lives.

We all have an inner creatrix.

It’s a fire that burns differently in each of us. As unique as your fingerprint. As easy as the faint grease marks it imprints on everything you touch.

We will never understand creativity. It’s free of formula. What works in one instance is hell in another. It’s a force that can never be fully understood - that’s why it’s so sexy.

Through deepening your relationship with self you can begin to understand the rhythms of your own creative expression. Alongside these waves of semi-predictable peaks and troughs in creative energy, there is so much chaos in it. Creativity is demanding and fleeting. It’s elusive one minute and then banging on your door at 3am. It’s addictive. And, though we try to fight against it by constructing formulas that put expression into neat little systems, it’s the ungraspable nature of creativity that makes it so magnetic. Art cannot be forced.

Creativity is the very antithesis of productivity. When something can be done logically, through following specific steps, we’re able to systemise the process and make it increasingly efficient to repeat. Creativity has no formula. Everything you make is new and so it’s impossible to predict what is required to bring something that literally doesn’t yet exist yet into the world.

Every time you make something you’re writing a new recipe for how you make that particular thing at the particular time. It’s like a labyrinth - the second one variable changes, the whole picture takes on a new shape. The only choice you have is to be present with what you’re making right now.

Art is for everyone.

There’s an historical elitism in creative spaces that has held up imaginary gates for far too long. When we look at the art that has impacted generations on an individual and cultural level it’s diverse and delicious and entirely limitless. Yet the history books and most prestigious spaces dedicated to art tend to pedestalise a very specific subset - namely, old, white men.

Subconsciously we adopt these stories about what “important” art is and which types of people make it. Even who is “allowed” to consume it. These stories, along with the very real privileges that put certain people at an advantage to devote huge chunks of their life to time spent in studio or gaining an education, mean that the race, class, gender etc etc etc divides grew deeper.

I have to believe technology grants us the tools to change this. We’ve seen it so much already. With unlimited super-speed wi-fi we can contribute to changing the narrative and democratising the point of entry to sharing what you create. The very definition of art has expanded and the gatekeepers have dwindled. Still, there are spaces that cling tightly to tired notions but the difference is now we can choose to operate independently. No matter what it is you aspire to create there are ways for you to make it happen without a single so-called qualified person waiting to give you the tick of approval before you begin. We can choose to make the things we wish exist and we can devote ourselves to getting it on the scrolling screens of people who might want to see it. We get to choose which artists we support through likes and follows and double-click, Face ID, instant bank deposits.

I don’t have a 10-step plan to radicalise capitalism for creatives but I do know that when I was born my job didn’t exist. There are people much smarter and more innovative than me who I hope are working on the answers. I’m just here to hopefully motivate you to create your own.

Creativity changes the world

It makes me feel evangelical to say it but finally showing up for my creativity changed my life. Partly because dedicating myself to becoming the artist I dreamt myself to be actually led me to be more prolific and therefore more abundant than ever. Making things is problem solving on crack. It’s a lifetime of living deeply in your own mind. Everything you create shows you different parts of yourself and develops entirely new ones. Giving myself permission to create the art I truly want to create is really giving myself permission to exist as myself and become myself even harder.

The other reason creativity changed my life is because it grants me the freedom to spend my days how I actually want to spend them. There’s no one else handing out the assignments. I get to spend my days doing exactly what I want to do in exactly the way I want to do it and that feels really fucking good.

Creativity awarded me this freedom through allowing me to see that I can create whatever experiences I desire and in being hellbent on realising one seemingly impossible dream after another, I became the person I always wanted to be. Someone both in charge and in flow with their life. Attune to the magic of believing in order to see but also making the moves necessary so that success is not only a possibility but an inevitability.

I believe the world becomes an increasingly better place when more people embody their own expression. People are happy that way and the world has more things to play with. When you tap into your ability to create yourself, your life, and your art, everything becomes a game. It’s play but it’s also risk.

I used to think the scariest thing would be to try as hard as I possibly could and fail but now I know that’s not true at all. The worst thing is to never really try at all, to keep your fantasies locked up and never let yourself feel how good it is to be in the doing of life.

That’s what a creatrix is really doing: living, experiencing, and making something out of it all.

This book is your guide to fully embodying your own creatrix within. Here I’ll be sharing the thought pattern shifts, tools, actions, and hard-learnt lessons that position you to turn the dial on your whole life up a notch or ten. I’m so excited to witness your transformation.

Let’s fucking go.