Let's Get Shallow: 20 Questions with Vanessa Li

Letting Creativity Breathe, & Getting to Know Me...on a Surface-Level

Photo Courtesy Gretchen Robards.

If you’ve been reading Tomatokind for a while (or know me personally), you know that I am someone who thinks everything is really that deep.

That is just how I was programmed: an unequivocal fact of my existence.

At 13, I made a PowerPoint presentation to my middle school class about the death of authentic human connection as a result of increasingly popular platforms like Facebook.

Preteen Vanessa witnessed her peers living full-blown lives in an ether of posts, pokes, and likes — and feared for her generation’s collective wellbeing.

Needless to say, it was a widely unpopular opinion among my peers (and also one that is slightly more nuanced today…albeit still dim).

What has not changed — however — is my tendency to spiral into the depths of wonder, postulation, and intensity.

Today, my appetite for meaning-making, story, and existential complexities…is as robust as ever. In fact, I credit my love for life to this obsession: an obsession with a certain mileage of thought.

But, there are down sides to this inability to merely graze the surface of daily encounters with people, places, and things.

The truth is: it is completely exhausting.

In particular — since leaning into my new life as a full-time creative entrepreneur (spurred by my layoff from a corporate career in May) — I have felt the urge to turn every observation of the natural (and people) world into a piece of art: an essay, an image, a video, a reflection…

(Perhaps, like what I am doing now.)

Photo Courtesy Gretchen Robards.

As a result, the last 6 months have felt something like this:

1. Awe at something in the world — a building, a passerby, someone else’s art, a quote in a book — and be inspired to create.

2. Log my new idea as a voice note to self, or on my Trello board or Notes App.

3. Graduate the idea to a rough outline (on Substack, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Luma).

4. Then, repeat steps 1-3 until the master list of creative ideas overflows from one month’s to-do list to another — and drafts slowly go stale from abandonment. Meanwhile, a few projects are delivered into the world.

Even though I create things that I am proud of, there is inevitably this underlying frustration when I log the delta (Δ) between my long list of ideas and my short list of “Published” ones.

This winter, though, I’ve been challenging this pattern by letting my creativity breathe (a.k.a. not expecting it to alchemize every inspiration, observation, and learning from my daily life into an original creation).