I have something to confess: Over the past two years, I have spent an ungodly amount of screen time on TikTok. It made up most of my living hours per day. I would wake up, stretch, open the app, and scroll. I would end my days exactly the same: close the lights, lie down, fry my brain until I’m asleep.
I was constantly hooked on the dopamine rush that is my FYP. The feed was curated to my exquisite taste: the latest news, Subway Takes, baking, Zohran Mamdani, cat distribution system, Palestine/Iran/Sudan, Chiikawa, Gaydar, car accidents, hopecore, Bangkok hidden gems. I am pibble, wash my belly.
I was proud of my FYP. It was something that I felt I built from the ground up.
Whenever someone criticizes TikTok, I would always come to the rescue and defend the platform:
“You just need to curate your FYP algorithm properly to find the right content.”
“There are a lot of creative people on TikTok.”
“Y’all are just haters.“
In most ways, I still find myself right. There are still a lot of creative people on TikTok. I learned a lot of stuff there. Recipes that are easy to make. Productivity tips that are actually quite useful. Life hacks in my 30s from sidneyraz. I don’t see the point in getting rid of it if I’m getting a lot from it.
Every day, I would tend to my FYP. Nurture it, pull out the weeds, cultivate the algorithm that “I’ve worked hard on.”
But when I put down my phone, I would feel empty, unaccomplished, unfulfilled.
I would bitch around in my therapy sessions about how I haven’t been creative for a long time. Impostor syndrome would kick in. “I call myself a creative in a creative field, without having creative output that I’m proud of for years.”
“When was the last time you felt unabashedly creative?”
Unabashedly creative.
The phrase brings up my childhood days. As a kid, I always had a penchant for colorful things. Rainbows, balloons, cartoons. Crayolas, paints, oil pastels. I would always go nuts at National Bookstore. I would beg my mama to get me a box of coloring materials. I would abuse them until they were almost an inch short. My school pad would be filled with drawings of mountains, rivers, trees, seas. Boring, monochrome illustrations in science books turned full color at my touch. No stone left unturned, as I would also paint stones into ladybugs and other insects.
By high school, that creativity turned digital. By 14, I would play around with Friendster codes to come up with my own website templates. HTML, CSS, and a smidge of JavaScript. I would share free Blogspot templates on the now-defunct blogskins.com, where I would share the codes and get blog visitors in return. Blog friends from Singapore, Malaysia, the USA. Granted, I was never a writer, but getting home from school would always be exciting because I felt validated as a web designer.
Full-blown websites by 16 years old. Someone gave me free domain and hosting. Now we’re getting into WordPress and PHP. Deleting a semicolon is a rite of passage.
Everything I did, I was proud of. I could feel that everyone was proud of me as well.
The continued validation would push me to get a Multimedia Arts degree. Things were falling into place.
Then I lost the drive during college. Going to Manila to study made me realize that I wasn’t really the bee’s knees. I’m just the same as everyone else. I questioned a lot of things: I questioned the validation I got. I questioned the people around me. I questioned myself. As I slowly eroded my own confidence, the digital landscape was fast-changing: now there were more things to learn: mobile responsiveness, media queries, border radiuses, parallax. Learning became a chore and a bore.
I graduated and started working shortly after. I didn’t really have the privilege of a safety net back then. The salary I got went directly to my basic necessities. What was left was handed over to help support my family financially. No more going nuts at National Bookstore. No more time to learn and design stuff for the web. My time and resources were focused on surviving.
I was still working in the creative field, constantly surrounded by creatives who were more confident than me. I could still be creative at work, but work is still work. I don’t own the things I do during those hours. The shame just worsened.
“Creativity” for me, was a luxury I couldn’t afford.
Now that I’m 32 and the responsibilities are starting to lift, I am slowly finding the time and resources again to start creating. Luckily enough, I can also consider myself a “Privileged Person™” now. It is still something that I’m not attuned to. It’s scary. But despite it all, this is now my reality. Now that the curse has been lifted, the luxuries that were once denied are now things I can grant myself.
I wanted to be creative again. But I didn’t know where to start. My therapist said that creativity is a muscle. To start, you must find the time to exercise it. In my case, my creativity was atrophied for wayyy too long. The thought of creating something feels like a big mountain. I would feel the fear before I even took the first step.
But I’m tired of the fear. That’s the realization from my therapy session last week.
I’m tired of finding excuses for myself.
I need to be creative again.
Start with something. What is something? Unabashedly creative. What was I good at?
Designing for the web. That’s what I’m good at.
Telling stories, surprisingly, but yes, I’m pretty confident at it.
But what medium?
The concept of digital gardens, or curiosity gardens, was introduced to me last year by struthless from his Brainrot Apocalypse video. I fished it out of my bookmarks bin and tried to absorb it again.
The idea was perfect. A digital plot of land that’s entirely my own to cultivate and grow. A place where I can freely share what I want to share. Share things that I’ve been holding back for too long because of my notion that “social media is not the best place to share feelings.” Finally, finding a way to stop relying on the curated, templated, oversaturated platforms of Silicon Valley tech billionaires.
A place where I can be unabashedly creative. Like I was when I was younger.
This is the first time in the longest time that I am fully proud of myself. The fact that I was able to finish this article was a big boost to my ever-so-crumbling ego.
I have a lot of stuff that I am excited to share over the next few weeks! Stories like music that I like to listen to, shows that I’m enjoying, brainfarts, etc. Share it in a way that is fun and creative.
If you’re still here reading this, thank you for being interested in me and my garden. I know this might be jarring, as I have never really been too open about the things that have happened over the past few decades. But this is actually the person that I am.
I am a person who is trying to unabashedly be creative again, and who is trying her hardest to get back.
Thanks for sticking around, and I hope to see you again here next time!
