What If I Fly?

There is a particular kind of silence that exists between an artist and a blank canvas. Not a peaceful silence. The kind that feels like being assessed. Judged. Measured. I sat staring at the insurmountable and the insurmountable, in the form of a blank canvas, stared right back. After an all-knowing inhale, it explained exactly why I shouldn’t even bother trying.

“Because you haven’t painted in so long, you’ll be back to square one. Not rusty; worse than rusty. More amnesiac than that. Like some vital part of you has quietly packed its bags and left during your absence. You used to know how to do this,” it continued. “Used to.” The canvas was ruthless. “You are the footballer that comes back from injury and is never quite the same again. The musician who forgets the chords. The writer who can’t find the words anymore. Maybe it’s time to consider that the day job is the real job now.”

And honestly? Part of me believed it, because time away from something you love has a strange way of convincing you that you were never capable of it in the first place. The longer the gap becomes, the more mythical your former self feels. You start remembering old achievements like they belonged to somebody else entirely. I think creative people experience this more than most. You can spend years building skill, confidence, instinct and momentum, only for self-doubt to arrive and whisper, “That was then.” And the worst part is that it rarely sounds dramatic. It sounds sensible, rational, responsible even. Perhaps that’s why so many people never restart the thing they once loved. Not because they can’t do it anymore, but because they’re afraid to discover they can’t.

As my mind tortured itself with all this nonsense, the song I was listening to ended and another one began.

“What If You Fly? (Sweet Disposition)” by BUNT. and The Temper Trap.

A beautifully remixed atmospheric track. The kind of song that somehow feels soothing and energising at the same time. The opening line drifted through the studio speakers:

“And, you might think, ‘what if I fall?’ Well, what if you don’t? What if you fly?”

For whatever reason, that landed differently that day. Maybe because fear always asks the same question, “What if this goes badly?”, but creativity — and maybe life in general — only really moves forward when somebody is willing to answer with, “Ok… but what if it goes right?”

“Shut up, Pedro,” I said out loud.

That’s part of a new technique I’ve been trying to quiet negative thoughts. You give your brain its own name, separate from yourself, and when the self-sabotage begins you remind yourself that your thoughts are not always facts. Initially Elizabeth was a more creative name, but I settled on Pedro. So now, whenever the internal doom monologue starts, I interrupt it.

“Not today, Pedro.”

Honestly, it helps more than I expected. The voice in your head gains a lot less authority when you imagine it as some dramatic little man named Pedro catastrophising in the corner of the room.

“Shut up, Pedro,” I said again. “What if I fly?”

So, I sat back down in front of the insurmountable and this time, instead of trying to paint brilliantly, or perfectly, or impressively… I just painted. No grand expectations or pressure for it to mean anything. No requirement for it to prove I still “had it.” Just paint on canvas; one brushstroke after another, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, something shifted. Not because every doubt disappeared. It didn’t, but because action has a way of counteracting fear. You don’t think your way out of creative paralysis, you move your way out of it. One small imperfect step at a time and by the end of it, I had created this.

Maybe it’s not my masterpiece. It doesn’t need to be. Maybe the important thing is simply that I came back to the canvas at all.

Tell me what you think of it. And tell me what you call your brain.

“You got this, Pedro.”