The Arena is my process for approaching creative work from a place of aliveness and play. Every trip through The Arena lasts one week, and is guided by singular creative intention. Other than that, there really are no rules other than to follow the aliveness. These logs are just for me to document what I did during any given sprint, along with how I'm feeling about it.

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Creative Intention: Make some lil videos of me playing guitar and post them to twitter! This combines three things that scare me—shipping imperfect work, playing guitar for other people, and posting videos of myself on a public social network. Also, this is an ongoing challenge, and I plan to keep doing this whenever the inspiration strikes!

What I Shipped From June 20th, 2022 to Present

Reflections

  • This was, by far, the scariest creative challenge I've done in awhile. I've got so many insecurities around the way I look, around how imperfect my guitar playing is, etc etc. So yeah, this one felt very edgy and uncomfortable at first.
  • Once I posted the first video and got a ton of great feedback on it, it was like "oh, maybe my insecurities weren't doing me any good lol." At this point, it doesn't feel particularly scary anymore to post these, even when I'm singing badly in them.
  • Aliveness meter: 10 out of 10 - that old adage about anxiety and excitement being two sides of the same coin felt true here. I felt a lot of buzz and tension in my body before posting the first of these, and eventually realized that energy, which I had classified as fear, actually IS aliveness. Scary things make you feel more alive than comfortable things, that's for sure.