📝 The Weekly Scroll: The things you once loved…

…will find their way back to you.

Have you ever found a phrase that speaks to you on a spiritual level? That was me this past week with: the things you loved when you were younger will find their way back to you.

See, I’ve been self-reflecting a lot lately, trying to figure out the best mix of my personal and professional identity.

I started my creator growth on LinkedIn, which meant I was really focused on developing the professional parts of myself, the professional image of myself. And it’s not that I didn’t have interests outside of that. I have lots of interests that I’m always exploring, but I just wasn’t thinking about them the way I typically do with work, where I spend time thinking about why I’ve made a certain decision or chosen a specific approach.

My personal taste never got that level of care. I’ve been developing my taste, perspective, and interests, without really paying attention to what they were or why.

Now I’m paying attention, and here’s what I’ve found.

I love making art almost as much as I love consuming it. When I was younger, I loved to draw and paint. I was an avid reader and writer, so I constantly had a pen in hand. I wrote letters, stories, and poetry (adults loved this one). I sang in the church choir. I loved being in front of and behind a camera, using my dad’s camcorder to make what I thought were home videos. Quiet as I was, I was also deeply curious about the world and eager to share. My parents will have plenty of stories about me bringing them something I’d made because I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever done.

Then the angst arrived, the teenage kind and the young adult kind after it, where you feel like conforming, then you want to rebel, then you don’t care, and then you come all the way back around to caring.

It took becoming a creator to come back around

The same effort and attention I’d been putting into my professional self, making things, putting them out, paying attention to what resonates, turned out to be a door back into who I used to be (and perhaps who I’ve always been). The loves did come back, just not through the same mediums.

I’m not filling notebooks with poetry these days, but I think the throughline is the same. I love the rhythm of creating, I love the process, and I still have the itch to show someone the coolest thing I’ve ever made. The camcorder kid became an adult who films everything (my camera roll can confirm). The kid who thought Sharpay had the best numbers in High School Musical became the adult who admires great performers, and who’s slowly building up the confidence to perform on camera herself.

What I was actually drawn to in all of it, I can see now, was the pursuit of excellence: the development of skill, the focus on being the best at whatever it is you’ve decided to do. Now that I’m an adult, I can see I’m still sort of the same person with a lot of the same interests, even if they’ve morphed a bit.

The case for paying attention

So here’s the version of this that applies to you. Try giving your personal interests the same level of thought you give your work. What did you love at age nine? What keeps resurfacing in your saves, your rewatches, the things you send to friends unprompted?

If you take one thing from this issue, let it be this: what you loved before anyone was watching is the least algorithm-influenced data you have about yourself. Your interests are unique to you, and the combination of them, how they all make up YOU, the person, is your thing, i.e., what nobody else can replicate.

The things you loved when you were younger will find their way back to you. Leave the door open so they can come in.

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SAVE YOUR IDEAS IN BUFFER

The Create space holds everything from shower thoughts to fully fleshed-out brainwaves, and on a week like this one, that’s the difference between posting and ghosting.

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WHAT’S IN MY SCROLL?

Part of what sparked my thoughts around this week’s issue can be attributed to Anna Howard of Wild Geese’s video on navigating the confusion of her early 20s.

And then the YouTube algorithm, perhaps realizing that I had deep curiosity about the topic, gave me a few more recommendations like this video on developing a creative universe from inés blanche.

I’m still in study mode, but I’ll make sure to take notes and report back on my epiphanies.

In social news, the apps have been on a roll lately, with lots and lots of features being rolled out, to mixed reactions.

On the one hand, you have Instagram finally giving us the highly (highly) requested reorder-your-feed feature (I love this). Then you have LinkedIn reducing the size of the reaction, comment, and share buttons (I don’t like this). Guess we can’t have it all.

Speaking of LinkedIn, they invited several creators to their New York headquarters to announce a creator marketplace to boost creator discovery on the platform. Big news for LinkedIn creators (me!)

That’s it from me.

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Until next week,

Tami

Sr. Content Creator