The most powerful inspiration you’ll ever have is your own life… your stories, emotions, and lived experiences. When you draw from that, you’re engaging in what I refer to as creative care. For me, creative care is both a practice and an ethos, essentially my artist manifesto. It’s about nourishing myself through making, and giving my creativity space to unfold as a process rather than seeing it as a production.
For so long institutions, museums and galleries have acted as gatekeepers: granting or withholding accessibility. But art is not granted validity or needing acceptance by any ‘external’ authority. Its existence is enough. The act of creation alone justifies itself. The very moment you make your art, you have given yourself ‘the permission’ for it to exist. No one else can authorise your inner world.
Art is deeply personal.
It comes from your lived experiences: your joys, celebrations, wounds, grief, heartbreak… and also your imagination, your dreamworld, your wishes and your desires. When you create, you are already in conversation with yourself.
Needing permission is often tied to fear… The fear of being judged, misunderstood, or dismissed. But art doesn’t need to be anything near perfect to exist. It doesn’t even need to be finished and polished. It doesn’t need to be anything other than what it is.
In our modern society that is constantly obsessed with productivity & perfection, we can know that making art without permission is an act of self-care. I matter enough to create. My story is worth expressing. You’re not asking if it’s ‘good enough’ or ‘useful enough’… You are honouring the need to bring something intangible into form.
So… how about a zine?
It’s one of the most radical (and simple) acts of creative self-care you can try… Here are 3 reasons I invite you to make one - today, tomorrow, or whenever you can carve out the time & space.
1. Freedom of Expression
A zine is self-published. That means you decide what it looks like, whether you share it publicly or keep it as a private archive. You can turn your ideas, poems, drawings, or reflections into something tangible, with no rules and no limits. The freedom is in the audacity to create without waiting for permission.
2. Tangible Connection
A zine transforms what’s inside—your thoughts, your emotions, your inner landscapes—into something you can hold in your hands. It doesn’t matter if it’s abstract or literal, what matters is the process. For me, zine-making is about enjoying that process, letting it stretch across an hour or even two months. Each page locks in a moment, a feeling or an idea. That is documentation. And that is powerful.
3. Personal Storytelling
Zines are also about voice. In a noisy world, they create space for your story to be heard, whether whispered to yourself or shared with others. The zine community is deeply supportive and diverse—through it, you can glimpse lives and perspectives you’d never otherwise encounter. And in return, your zine adds to that mosaic.
Your Life as Archive
Make enough zines (or any body of art), and you’re building a creative library of your own life - a whole personal archive expressed through art. Each one is a small act of defiance, care, and storytelling. How cool!
So, go ahead. Make a zine. Start with scraps, poems, sketches, or reflections. Use your own life as your muse. Because you don’t need permission. You just need to start making…