On Creating

When you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. So create.

— _why

I came across this line on social media a few weeks ago. It cut into me with a precision I wasn't ready for, caught right in the gap between finishing high school and starting college, drifting between what had been and what would be.

The line returned to me one evening when I was reading about a hackathon winner. The project had taken first place, 200,000 RMB, and a great deal of attention. It was an instrument that combined the interface of the Suzuki Omnichord with the form language of a certain influencer's beloved Hichord, and I recognized both references the moment I saw them, having spent enough time with instrument design to know where the lines came from.

I clicked through the product page like a hungry wolf, sniffing for the seams, the patterns I had seen elsewhere, the small giveaways that only someone in this corner of the world would catch. I found them. I pointed them out, one by one, to a friend who happened to know the original creator, and for a few minutes I felt the small relief of having said the clever thing.

The feeling afterward was harder to name. Nothing about what I had done was logical or respectable. I had been feeding a small, hungry self esteem by chipping away at someone else's work, and the truth underneath was simple and ugly. I was jealous. I wanted to believe that with a few more months of attention, with the right opportunity caught early enough, I could have made the same thing. Calling out the borrowed parts was a way of keeping that belief intact, a way of making the gap between what I had done and what they had done feel smaller than it actually was.

The picture, when I looked back at the past three or four years, was mixed in ways I had been avoiding. Time had been spread across guitar, music, code, AP courses, electronic instruments, things I picked up and put down without finishing. By any honest accounting, almost none of them were complete. The list of unfinished work was longer than the list of finished work, and none of it was abstract. A guitar I could read tabs on but could not play by ear. Circuits I half understood. A startup that lived only in conversations with myself. A repo I had stopped opening because I already knew what was broken inside it. A small batch of modules owed to customers, pushed back week after week with promises I kept making to myself and not telling them. For a long time I called this failure, and the word stuck because the person I kept measuring myself against was never an actual peer. He was a composite figure assembled from the most exceptional cases I had read about, the kind who only appears in headlines because almost nobody else lives that life, and against a figure like that the gap will stay open no matter what gets done. The fear of missing the AI wave, the fear that a gap year ought to have produced something more legible to the world, all of this came from the same place and kept changing costumes because the place itself was uncomfortable to look at directly. The question hiding underneath was whether I was allowed to take time, whether years could matter without producing anything I could hold up to be measured.

Something else had been building during those years that did not fit the failure story. A taste for what was worth returning to. An instinct for which materials felt like mine and which felt borrowed in a way I would never make peace with. An eclectic mind that could face the next thing without needing permission to start. And a nervous system that could feel when something was off in a circuit, in a track, in a piece of writing, well before I had the words to explain why. None of this shows up on a resume, but it shows up everywhere else, in every small judgment that determines whether a thing gets made well or gets made at all.

I would have stayed there, balancing the two readings against each other, if the rest of the story hadn't written itself a few days later.

This week, at an event, I was playing my instrument when the same creator, the hackathon winner, sat down next to me. We ended up on the bench together, talking about ideas, workflows, the small problems we were each stuck on. He was generous in a way I had not prepared for. He shared what he was figuring out and asked about what I was making, and somewhere in the middle of the conversation I noticed that none of the seams I had catalogued mattered anymore. The jealousy did not survive the proximity. What I had thought of as a private grievance turned out to have been a wall I had built between myself and someone who, given five minutes of actual contact, simply wanted to talk shop. There is nothing more beautiful than music, and that sensation.

What sitting on that bench made me admit was something I had been circling without saying. There is no such thing as a real creation. A person is the ultimate collection of their inputs, and what other people see at the end of the process is the blending and recombination of everything human society has made, refracted through one ideology, one mindset, one set of hands that happen to be the hands doing the work this time. The hackathon winner had borrowed from Suzuki and Hichord. I had borrowed from every modular synth I had ever touched, every classical guitar piece I had tried to learn, every patch I had reverse engineered late at night, every maker whose work I had quietly studied without ever telling them. What separates the people who get to be called creators from the people who only get to be called critics has very little to do with originality. It has to do with whether the borrowed pieces get assembled into something visible, something offered to the world, or whether they stay quiet inside one person who can name every seam in someone else's work but never has to expose any seams of their own.

That removed the last hiding place. The fantasy of originality had been the thing keeping my critique alive, and once that fantasy went, the critique had nowhere left to stand.

The line still stands. Taste alone will narrow you, and on a long enough timeline it will turn you into the kind of person who picks apart other people's work to feel less small. But taste paired with the willingness to make something, even badly, even unfinished, even derivative in ways that embarrass you, becomes a way of finding the world, and sometimes a way of finding the people in it. The bench did not give me an answer. It made an answer unnecessary, which I think is what most answers turn out to be.

So I am writing this down to remind myself.

Create. Then create again.