68. Bad Art: Challenging the Negative and Perfectionist Narrative with Amenah Arman

 
 
 
 
 
 

The Ideas in Our Heads

How often have you had an idea that you did not follow through on?

Maybe you imagined something incredible, but you didn’t create it. Or you said it wasn’t quite there yet, so you never shared it with others or put it out into the world at all.

How do you decide which ideas are good or bad or worthy of release?

There are so many good ideas, concepts, content, and art out there living in people’s heads that we aren’t getting to witness because they haven’t followed through and released those ideas.

Amenah Arman joins India for a conversation about creative hoarding, bad art, and why we don’t pursue our ideas and visions.

Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:

  • What creative hoarding is and why we do it

  • The social and cultural influences on how we access creativity

  • Why therapy services need to be tailored to the individual

  • Two things you can do to get your creativity unblocked

Creatively Cultivating Self-Acceptance 

Amenah Arman is a holistic therapist, community organizer, advocate, and artist. As a nationally certified counselor, she supports creatives, marginalized communities, and those who feel like outsiders in their own life. Taking a nontraditional approach to therapy, she helps her clients cultivate self-acceptance and identify what they need to thrive.

Amenah specializes in narrative exposure therapy and has been sought out for her approach to addressing anxiety in adolescent women of color. She received her MS in Clinical Mental Health Counseling and Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from Georgia State University.

How Amenah Flaunts Her Fire

On the Flaunt Your Fire® podcast, Amenah Arman says that Flaunting Her Fire is “allowing myself to take up space and to just simply show up.”

She says that for a long time, she was “hiding behind words and captions,” but with some urging from clients and support from India and Erica Courdae, and after taking a few months between downloading the app and sharing her first videos, Amenah finally started creating content on TikTok and being the face of her business and her brand.

A Hoard of Ideas and Endeavors

India notes the lag Amenah had between downloading TikTok and beginning to post content, and how common it is for people to have an urge to create or share something and be unable to see the idea to fruition. She asks Amenah how this relates to the concept of creative hoarding.

Amenah shares that creative hoarding is similar to how people hoard objects.

“People who hoard things assign value to each and every item…and regardless of whether they’re in need of those items or not, they just continue to hoard them. And the same applied to creative ideas and endeavors. We may or may not assign value to the piece or the idea, but…we just can’t see it through, and we also can’t get rid of it. So it goes into the box of creativity.”

She says she noticed this happening for many of the creatives she sees in her clinical practice. “I kept hearing the beautiful ideas, clients sharing their ideas with me, and I’m like, where are all of these ideas going? And I could just visually see it. It was just a hoard of ideas and endeavors.”

India says this concept was an aha moment for her, because though she practices minimalism in her physical spaces, she realized “how many things are still living in my head that I’m hoarding and not putting out into the world.”

How Self-Perception Limits Us

There are many individual reasons why we hoard our ideas, but Amenah says that limiting beliefs and our perceptions of ourselves, and the work that we do certainly play roles in how our creativity gets stuck. 

“There is so much attachment that we have to our own perception of the work itself. So if I don’t assign value to this thing, and if I don’t feel like it’s perfect enough to be released, then no one’s going to receive it.”

She says if our perceptions of ourselves and our work skew negatively, we’re never going to create and release our ideas.

Because self-perception is so intertwined with creative hoarding, India asks if there are aspects of emotional safety at play when we’re releasing our ideas or not.

Amenah says she frequently sees clients who come to her saying they’re creatively blocked, but “I’ve dealt with my stuff,” but when she begins to work with them, “we start seeing some of the unprocessed emotional stuff that’s just kind of lingering in the background.”

She continues that the creative block is a surface-level issue, but it traces further back than the here and now.

“It’s what you were taught about creativity when you were young, and whether your creativity was championed or validated…the way it shows up in the present is how I perceive myself to be.” 

And if that self-perception is harmful, “I won’t allow myself to be seen, and I won’t allow my craft or my content to be seen either, and I’m going to label it as bad.”

Accessing Creativity

There are social, cultural, and economic factors that impact how we see art and creativity as children and then in our adult lives.

“When you’re in survival mode, there is no access to creativity. That’s not something that’s championed.”

India says that for her and many other Black women she knows, growing up, creative endeavors were seen as hobbies but were never considered work or as potential career opportunities. “That was considered setting yourself up to be a starving artist.”

Amenah also notes that in the Middle Eastern culture she grew up in, there is a strong emphasis on humility that she says “feels toxic because you’re not allowing yourself to walk into your greatness…That creative ego has to be championed and has to be boosted.”

India agrees that toxic humility can “take away from one’s confidence in their work, confidence in what they’re presenting and belief in self.” 

Amenah says it also leads to downplaying or not claiming expertise when it’s seen as “braggy.” 

India adds that a lack of confidence can also mean waiting for someone else to confer expertise on you, especially earlier in your career.

Amenah says she experienced those feelings when claiming her expertise on Instagram and TikTok, “I was waiting for permission from a source that’s unknown to me,” but she had to learn to validate herself internally.

India agrees and says that whether it was when she was competing in bodybuilding or when she takes on a new project now, someone “could have told me that [it was going to work out] all day long, but I had to believe it.”

Re-Examine Your Perceptions

Even though Amenah made a major shift into using her authentic voice working with creatives in her practice, when she started posting videos to social media, she still had to overcome negative self-perception to post her videos.

“I sat there for hours recording and re-recording thinking I sounded stupid…[But] once I wasn’t fearful of my perception, and I just acknowledged that hey, the perception is going to be there…but I can’t rely on that or depend on that because my perception is oftentimes skewed.”

Witnessing her clients struggling in similar ways to get their ideas out and past their egos labeling everything they did as bad, she started “thinking what if I was able to get these clients to see that the Bad Art wasn’t what they had perceived it to be. I kind of thought of a way to push them to…re-examine their perception of the work itself.”

Her workshop, “Bad Art,” was born out of “agitation with the way creatives perceive themselves and then the importance that they place on their own perception.”

Address the Stuff

For creatives who are struggling with feeling blocked, Amenah emphasizes that you address “the stuff rather than addressing the block.”

In her practice, she uses the preferred format or medium of the client to tailor that work. “You can use their process of creating to process some of the childhood stuff that needs to be processed.”

She says that for creatives and for people from marginalized communities, traditional therapy can feel “like a familiar space in which [they are] misunderstood,” because they don’t process their past or their feelings in a neat way.

“They’re going to feel like the way they process is messy. They’re going to feel inarticulate because their thoughts come out in fragments at times…If they come into therapy and again, it’s another place where they have to perform, they’re going to shut down.”

She says services need to be tailored to the way people process.

India says that is a major difference in the way she and people in her life have experienced therapy, where the focus is on the particular modality the therapist specializes in.

Tailoring her services to the individuals she is working with gives Amenah’s clients “a sense of agency in telling their story, telling their narrative through their lens.”

She continues, “I think the most powerful piece of the work is in…seeing how much lighter these clients are.”

Create and Release

For a small step toward getting unblocked, Amenah reminds us to inhale and exhale. 

“Think of creating and releasing as inhaling and exhaling. You need to inhale. We need to take the oxygen. But you also need to exhale. So creating is inhaling. Releasing is exhaling.”

She also says, “your perception of you at times does not matter, especially when it comes to creative endeavors. Challenge that perception.”

Connect With Amenah Arman:

Ready to Dive Deeper?:

Question your perception of what is good content or bad content, identify where your creative stuckness may be coming from, and unpack your creative hoard in the immersive workshop Bad Art with Amenah Arman.

Whether you consider yourself to be a creative or not, we all have ideas and a fire burning within us. If you have an urge to see that spark come to life, but you don’t know how, Bad Art is for you. Get access to Bad Art and the rest of our full resource library inside Pause on the Play® the Community.

 
Flaunt Your Fire