How I Started Making Things Again, Badly, On Purpose

I used to draw constantly. Not well, necessarily, but constantly — margins of notebooks in high school, the backs of receipts, whatever paper was closest. Somewhere around my late twenties that stopped, the way a lot of things quietly stop without an obvious moment where you decided to quit. I told myself I was busy. That was true, but it wasn't the real reason. The real reason is that at some point making things started to feel like a performance review instead of a pleasure, and if I wasn't going to be good at it, some part of my brain decided it wasn't worth doing at all.

For almost six years I didn't make anything. I bought nice notebooks sometimes, the way you buy running shoes when you're trying to convince yourself you're about to become a runner, and they sat on a shelf mostly empty, which somehow made me feel worse than not owning them at all — proof of an intention I kept not following through on.

What actually got me unstuck was almost embarrassingly low-stakes. A coworker had a Wildwood Botanical Journaling Set open on her desk at lunch, just doodling and sticking bits of washi tape onto a page with no apparent goal, and I asked what she was making. She said "nothing, I'm just messing around," and something about that phrase unlocked a door I didn't know was shut. Messing around. Not a project. Not a piece. Just moving a pen around on paper because it felt good in the hand.

I bought myself a similarly unserious set that weekend — the Coffeehouse & Museum 147-Piece Journaling Set, mostly because I liked the little museum-ticket stickers in it — and I gave myself one rule, which was that nothing I made in it was allowed to be good. I'm serious about that rule. If a page started looking like it might turn into something I was proud of, I'd deliberately mess it up a little, a stray line or a sticker in a dumb spot, just to remind myself this book wasn't auditioning for anything.

I want to be upfront about the two things that kept me away from this for six years, because I think a lot of people reading this are sitting in the exact spot I was in. First: I didn't think I was "the type." I am not a crafty person. I don't scrapbook, I've never taken an art class as an adult, and the aesthetic of journaling — the flat-lay photos, the perfect handwriting — genuinely intimidated me out of trying for years, because it looked like a skill I didn't have rather than a habit anyone could just start. Second, and more honestly: I thought it was a little silly. A grown adult, gluing stickers into a notebook. It took me a long time to admit that "silly" was doing a lot of work protecting me from trying something I might turn out to be bad at, in front of, well, nobody, since nobody else was ever going to see it.

The notebook didn't stay bad on purpose for very long, though, which surprised me. Within a couple of months I had pages I actually liked — not because I was trying to make good ones, but because doing something enough times, with no pressure attached, is basically how anyone gets better at anything. I started drawing again, actual drawing, small ink sketches in the margins around the stickers and tape, the exact habit I'd dropped in my twenties, except now it had no audience and no stakes and therefore nowhere for the old anxiety to attach itself.

There's a practical side to this I didn't expect either. A night of doing this costs me the price of a sheet of stickers or a roll of washi tape, which is to say, less than one round of drinks out, and it leaves me with a page instead of a headache. I used to default to a couple of beers to unwind after a hard week; now more often I default to the notebook and a call with a friend instead, and I don't miss the trade-off nearly as much as I expected to. Two of my friends picked up the habit around the same time — one because she saw mine sitting out on my desk and got curious, the other because I badgered her into it — and now we occasionally meet up and journal together at somebody's kitchen table, trading stickers back and forth like we're eleven again, which is a genuinely strange and wonderful thing to get to say about your thirties.

There's a specific page from around month four that I still flip back to sometimes. It's nothing — a lopsided sketch of the coffee mug on my desk, a strip of green washi tape running crooked along the bottom edge, and one line of handwriting that just says "Tuesday, raining, mug is chipped and I like it anyway." I remember exactly how it felt to make it: a little cold in my apartment, a candle going, no music because I wanted to hear the pen. It's not a page I'd ever show anyone, and that's precisely why it's one of my favorites. It reminded me that "making something" doesn't have to mean making something for an audience of anyone but the person making it.

I've also noticed the habit spilling outward in small ways I didn't plan for. I started doodling again in meeting notebooks at work, little unimportant shapes in the margins while I listen, the exact thing I used to do at fifteen without thinking twice about it. A friend saw one of my journal pages and asked if I'd ever thought about actually taking a drawing class, and I laughed, because six months earlier the idea would have terrified me, and now it just sounded like a nice way to spend a Tuesday. I haven't signed up yet. But I notice I'm not scared of the idea anymore, which feels like its own small, quiet victory.

I don't think I'm a "creative person" again in some grand sense, and I've stopped needing that label. What I have is a page most nights, and a pen that moves across it without waiting for permission to be good first. If you used to make things — write, draw, build, whatever your version was — and you can't remember exactly when you stopped, I'd gently push back on the idea that you need inspiration, or talent, or a real project, to start again. You mostly just need a blank page you've given yourself full permission to ruin. Start there. See what happens when nothing is riding on it.