Running on Empty Isn't a Creative Process
Taking a break from photography was actually really good for me.
For a while I was doing both. Working a normal 9-5 job and still shooting, still posting, still trying to keep up with it. But I was running on empty and I think the work knew it before I did.
I wasn't inspired and I wasn't taking anything in.
I wasn't sitting with things that moved me or paying attention to what I actually wanted to make. I was just going through the motions, and the photos were fine, but fine wasn't what I wanted to put my name on.
So I stopped!
Me breaking free from the shackles of the fake, egotistical rules of the creative process.
I deleted my Instagram, which sounds WAY more dramatic than it was. It just kind of disappeared and that was fine.
The weird part was when I started thinking about coming back after two years.
I had this idea in my head that returning meant picking back up exactly where I left off, same work, same presence, like I had to prove the break didn't change anything. Which is a lot of pressure to put on yourself over an Instagram account and photography business.
A few people who knew me assumed I had quit photography altogether and I kind of just went with it. Nodded along. Yeah I don't really do that anymore. Even though I went to school for it. Even though I actually love it.
It's funny how fast you can talk yourself out of something when you don't have a public record of it anymore.
I ended up on TikTok during that time and honestly that was really good for me. Lower stakes, different audience, something new to figure out. It was a way back into creating without all the baggage I had attached to the other thing.
I think we're really hard on ourselves about creative breaks.
Everything is so immediate now and there's this expectation that if you love something you should be producing it constantly and publicly or it doesn't count. But that's not how it works. You can love photography and not be shooting. You can love writing and not be posting. The thing doesn't go away just because you got quiet for a while.
Think about your favorite artist for a second. Mine is Georgia O'Keeffe.
She was incredibly intuitive and prolific, but she went quiet a lot throughout her career. Took time to refill, experimented, played, tried things nobody was going to see. The only way you would have even known she wasn't producing was if the galleries went empty. That's it. No feed going quiet, no one wondering what happened to her. She could just exist for a while and let the work come when it came.
We don't have that luxury anymore and I think it messes with people more than we admit.
Maybe it’s not coming back, rather resuming.
We live in this weird moment where AI can generate a hundred images before you've finished forming an opinion, and I think that's quietly started to warp how we see human creativity.
Like if a machine can produce endlessly, why can't you. But that's not a fair comparison and honestly it's kind of an insane standard to hold yourself to.
You are not an endless vessel. I mean technically maybe you are, but not on a Tuesday when you're tired and uninspired and the last three things you made felt like going through the motions.
Creativity needs input. It needs stillness.
It needs you to actually live something before you can make something. You have to take things in before you can put anything out, and that process is not always visible and it doesn't always look productive.
There's this pressure to create constantly and publicly and on a schedule, and if you go quiet people assume the worst, that you quit, that something happened, that you're not serious anymore.
But some of the best creative work in history came after long periods of nothing. The dormancy is part of it. The hibernation is part of it.
Expecting a masterpiece every single day isn't ambition, it's just absurd.
With love,
Olivia 🖤