The Unadulting Society

Private creation saved my sanity after my content was farmed. I started a password-protected blog that only three trusted friends have access to. I film little videos and save them to an external hard drive. I draw things and pin them to a corkboard in my room instead of posting them online. Here's what surprised me: the creative process actually got BETTER. When I wasn't creating for an audience — when I wasn't subconsciously editing myself for public consumption — I made weirder, messier, more honest things. Private creation isn't "giving up." It's reclaiming your creative process from the spectator economy. You can always choose to share things later, selectively, in safer spaces. But the creation itself belongs to you, regardless of whether anyone else ever sees it.

"Less performative. More mine." — those four words capture something essential about where the joy of creating actually lives. After my art was stolen and reposted without credit, I stopped drawing for almost a year. When I started again, it was in a physical sketchbook that never gets photographed or scanned, that exists only on my desk. It turns out the making is the part that matters — sharing was a separate thing I'd conflated with creating. I don't think it's giving up at all. I think it's reclaiming creation from the economy of attention.

There's something about working with your hands that reconnects you to being human in a way screens never can. I strip rust off old cast iron pans. My friend builds model trains. Another friend bakes sourdough. Different tools, same impulse — making something tangible in a world that increasingly wants everything to be digital and disposable.

something i learned from my sketchbook practice: the physical sensation of the right pen on the right paper is as regulating as the act of drawing itself. i wonder if that applies to other things too — like, maybe the joy isn't just in the hobby, maybe it's also in the texture and weight and sound of the materials.