Think back to the first person who took your creative side seriously. Maybe a teacher who read your story out loud to the class. An aunt who framed your drawing. A manager who said, "You should do more of this." You might still hear their words when you sit down to make something.
Have you ever told them?
We underestimate how much thanks matters
In 2018, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley published research in Psychological Science in which people wrote letters of gratitude to someone they felt thankful to, then predicted how the recipient would feel. Recipients reported how they actually felt.
The letter writers expected a positive reaction, but the recipients felt even more positive and more surprised than the writers predicted, and less awkward than the writers feared. The authors suggest that this mismatch may keep people from expressing gratitude more often.
Writing it may help you, too
The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley describes the gratitude letter as a practice: choose someone you've never properly thanked and write them a specific letter about what they did and how it affected your life. Its guide notes that people have taken anywhere from about 5 to 30 minutes to write one.
In a randomized trial published in 2018, Y. Joel Wong and colleagues asked adults seeking help at a university counseling center to write a gratitude letter each week for three weeks, alongside their counseling. Compared with clients who wrote about negative experiences or received counseling only, the gratitude writers reported better mental health four and twelve weeks later. It's one study in one setting, but it adds to a wider body of work on gratitude practices.
Gratitude for the people who saw you early is also a way of remembering who you are.
Why this belongs in your creative life
Gratitude is a way of noticing who holds you up. For many busy people, the creative part of life is the part that gets pushed aside. Remembering the person who first believed in it is a quiet way of saying: this matters, and it always has. It can also remind you that your creativity has already touched someone else, in whatever form it takes. And if you've drifted apart from this person, a letter is a gentle way to reconnect.
How to write the letter
- Pick one person. Someone whose belief in your creativity shaped you, living or not, reachable or not.
- Be specific. Describe what they did and said, and when. "In ninth grade you told me my poem made you cry" lands more than "thanks for everything."
- Say what it changed. How did it show up in your life afterward? What are you making now?
- Decide whether to send it. Sending or reading it to them is the classic practice. If that isn't possible, writing it still lets you name what they gave you.
Where an accountability partner helps
A gratitude letter is easy to plan and easy to postpone. An accountability partner can hold you to a date, and can be someone you tell afterward how it felt to write it, or how the person responded. You might even find yourself thanking your partner, too, for being the one who believes in what you're making right now.
This week
Set aside twenty minutes. Write a letter to the first person who believed in your creative side. Be specific about what they did and what it changed. Then decide, with no pressure, whether to send it.