The Comfort Trap: Living Without Creating
For a long time, my days felt like a loop I couldn’t escape. I’d come home exhausted, collapse into bed, and let whatever show I was watching carry me to midnight. It wasn’t bad, exactly — it was comfortable. But comfort slowly turned into numbness. I wasn’t unhappy, but I wasn’t fulfilled either. I missed that feeling of being absorbed in something I loved, of watching myself grow, even in small ways. I just didn’t know where to start.
Picking Up a Pencil: Five Minutes That Changed Everything
The shift began quietly. One night, instead of clicking “next episode,” I grabbed a pencil. I wasn’t trying to reinvent my life or unlock some new identity — I simply wanted to do something that felt like mine. I told myself I’d draw for five minutes. Just a quick sketch, nothing serious. Those five minutes stretched into twenty, then thirty, and before I knew it, picking up a pencil became the most grounding part of my day. It wasn’t about talent or perfection or even results. It was about presence. And I hadn’t felt present in a long time.
Art is something I’ve always admired from afar. I used to tell myself I “wasn’t the art type,” or that creativity belonged to people who were born with it. I watched friends and family sketch effortlessly and wished I had that magical ability — as if they were in some exclusive club I didn’t qualify for. I wrote myself off before I even tried. It felt safer that way.
Overcoming the “I’m Not the Art Type” Mindset
That mindset followed me into adulthood, until I read the book Mindset. The biggest lesson I took away was simple, almost embarrassingly so: you can be anything you want with enough practice. There’s no cheat code, no shortcut, no hidden talent you either have or don’t have. You just show up, consistently, even if you’re terrible at first. Especially if you’re terrible at first.
That idea cracked something open in me. It was the same reason I went back to school to learn coding. I told myself I wanted to be good at it — so I practiced. Over and over. I became the kind of person who could build things because I decided I would, not because it came naturally. And if that was true for coding, why wouldn’t it be true for art?
How Mindset and Atomic Habits Guided Me
Around the same time, I read Atomic Habits, which taught me how to design small, almost foolproof systems that make progress inevitable. So I paired the two mindsets together: practice and consistency. No pressure, no perfectionism, no expectations. Just five minutes a day with a pencil. Five minutes that grew into a ritual.
Now I can’t imagine my life without it.
Creation Is About Who You Become
Since April, my art journey has become something I’m genuinely obsessed with — in the best way. I draw every single day. I doodle during meetings (still listening, don’t worry). I look at the world differently: shapes, shadows, angles, colours. I think about the next thing I want to try, the next challenge I want to push myself through. And the improvement… it’s wild. I don’t think I realized how far I’d come until my family and friends started commenting on it. There’s something incredibly validating about someone noticing the thing you quietly worked on when no one else was watching.
I started with a simple six-pack of pencils. That’s it. No fancy tools, no expensive sketchbooks, nothing aesthetic or intimidating. Just paper and graphite. But once I let myself play — really play — my curiosity exploded. Now I experiment with alcohol markers, gouache, watercolours, and acrylic paint markers. I’m learning how each tool behaves, how they blend, how they fight me, and how they sometimes surprise me in the best ways. Every medium teaches me something different.
But the biggest lesson isn’t about art at all:
It’s about who I become when I choose to create.
Creating makes me feel awake. It reminds me that I’m capable of growth. It teaches me patience. It makes me feel like I’m participating in my own life instead of watching it from the outside. It’s a quiet kind of joy — the kind that builds slowly, softly, until one day you realize you’re proud of yourself, not for what you made, but for the simple fact that you showed up.
Start With Five Minutes: Choosing Creation Over Autopilot
If you’re stuck in that cycle of consuming because you’re too tired to do anything else, I get it. Truly. It’s hard to break out of. But maybe you don’t need a big transformation. Maybe you just need five minutes. Five minutes of trying something you’ve always admired. Five minutes of letting yourself be bad at something without giving up. Five minutes of choosing creation over autopilot.
You never know — it might change everything.
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