I want to get to that place where I can create but not hold my ideas and my efforts as “precious”.
I think a lot of this preciousness come from putting a lot of weight on my stories and ideas. I see them as being redemptive in-themselves instead of the struggle of their creation as a journey/opportunity to learn and expand my own mind so that I can share/teach/help others. My desire to share/express my own stories should be about wanting the journey—and taking that seriously—without taking any of one steps along the way too seriously.
A story can change the world, it can outlast a lifetime, but no one knows who/when/what that story will be (I think) because the story is only one point of the three-legged stool. The audience is just as much a part of what props it up. If there isn’t a self-perpetuation gestalt behind a story it’s import/relevance will falter. Shakespeare thought he’d be remembered for his poems, but the only reason we read those is because of the trashy plays he wrote that he could even be bothered to collectively publish—many of his plays have no definitive edition, what you read is an amalgam of the actors’ copies, many with “improvements” made a long the way.
Taking the stool metaphor to the breaking point, the story leg of the stool isn’t made of solid wood but mostly of fragments/splinters of earlier, harder wood epoxied together and shaped (yes, I’ve gotten sucked down the rabbit hole of wood turning videos on YouTube). Much of what I’m bringing is just epoxy holding earlier pieces together. When my stories fall into irrelevance pieces of my story leg—epoxy and all—may make their way into other’s stories. And so the cycle continues.