It’s all been done, but don’t let that stop you.

I know I’m not the only one who has gone through this. We all want to believe we came up with something completely new, entirely different, utterly original. When that big idea comes, it fills you up and feels so undeniable, like you’ve tapped into something so unique and special that even The Muse Herself is gasping in awe. As creators, we can be narcissistic like that, and we can’t see the forest for the trees (that’s an accurate usage of that adage, right? Just checking).

That feeling can be what drives us and motivates us to make the idea become something real. Now I know I just lumped all creators into a basket of narcissism, which is super unfair, so I’ll kick everyone else out of that basket now and say that in my own experience, when that big idea comes and I get super pumped about it and am able to see it through to completion, I have a tendency to operate with blinders firmly applied, blocking out practically everything else. It might be the ADHD, but I also think that’s a common thing for creative people in general.

When the thing is finished (usually a written thing, because that’s my primary form of self-expression), the insatiable need to share it with others takes over, which kind of sucks because I have this thing where I don’t like to bother people, so, you know. This blog post isn’t really about that specifically, but it does live in the same neighborhood.

Yesterday when I was brainstorming ideas for sharing my newly released “thing” (Maladaptive! Now available on a whole bunch of online retail sites including Amazon, check it out!), I thought it might be cool to show the progress of retail locations populating on my wide distribution universal book link through Books2Read. But I mistyped the URL from memory, and what did I find, but another book with the exact same title.

So then I went to Amazon and typed in my book title, to find MORE books with the same title. And it would be a lie to say that I was, like, perfectly fine with that. I may have had a bit of an internal meltdown, actually, for a little while.

I’m okay now, but I’m a little embarrassed at my reaction. How territorial I felt, like the idea is mine, the title is mine, it’s all mine because I remember the moment when the idea came to me and I was daydreaming instead of sleeping one night, and unless someone else was in my head with me, I  was the originator. I. Me. Mine. (With some indirect credit to The Beatles because they’ve influenced practically everything In My Life… I’m on a roll, somebody stop me…)

What was I saying? Right. I’m ashamed of my territorial reaction, because after perusing the other books, and finding that some of them were, indeed, similar in nature to mine, they aren’t exactly the same. They are all unique, all original, and all part of something profoundly human that many of us have in common.

It’s not that I’m not special or unique, and it’s not that my book is not special or unique. We all are, and all of our stories are. This is a community, and I’m part of it, and I want to be someone who supports other members of that community, not feels threatened by them.

It’s been said billions of times in millions of ways, that even if it’s all been done before, you should do it anyway, because no one can say it, write it, paint it, play it, sing it, or make it the way YOU can. I’m heartened by that perspective and even though I knew it somewhere inside me already, I needed to confront it head on.

It brought me back to my creative writing program in college, so many years ago. A room full of hopeful student writers with variations on the same dream. And when our instructors gave us a writing prompt, we didn’t turn out 20 identical stories. We all came up with something unique (but maybe not special, because, you know, that takes practice).

The thing about creative narcissism (and what I mean isn’t the clinical definition of narcissistic personality disorder, I just mean the tendency that some… not all… creatives have to believe we’ve originated something groundbreaking because it feels that way to us, because it makes so much sense to us that our egos take the wheel) is that there is the inevitable flipside to that.

There are a lot of moments in our process where the opposite thinking takes over, like when something didn’t come together the way we envisioned it and the “OMG I’m not a genius, I actually suck” narrative begins to play. Or when impostor syndrome kicks in and we’re looking around, waiting and wondering when the Art Police will arrest us for… what? I don’t even know. Existing, maybe.

I’m generalizing again, of course. Maybe not everyone feels this way. But bear with me, because like I said, this is a community. This is a “we” thing, not a “me” thing. I’m not alone. Recognizing my own creativity and my own self-doubt means recognizing our collective creativity and self-doubt, and cheerleading for others who told their story in the way only they can, regardless of where or how much we overlap.

So, humbly, cheers to you, to me, to all of us, and our special and unique minds.