Let yourself go!

  Criticism can be a real dampener when it comes to creative freedom and there is no harsher critic than the little voice inside your head. Unless you were brought up by victorian, devil worshiping, alcoholic, child-abusers, there is a good chance that your doting parents gave you loads of encouragement, even going as far as sticking your utterly rubbish, sheet-of-paper-covered-in-splashes-of-paint-and-glued-on-pasta-shells to the fridge where it stayed for months.  

  As you grew up, you were quite happy to try your hand at whatever medium fell into your grasp and did so without any sense of how talented you might or might not have been. It was fun. A lot of fun. In fact the creativity was just another form of expression with no judgement on the result at the end. What innocent joy. Do you even remember those days anymore? Of course not.

Art, maybe.

  At some point towards the end of the age of innocence, probably about the time the novelty of your existence wore off for your parents and your siblings or peers started taking the piss, you started noticing the little voice in your head telling you that you weren't Michelangelo. That was probably it for your creativity. Shame.

  Though I don't have an agent or a gallery, I do think of myself as an artist. You have no doubt guessed my preferred medium and though I'm definitely no Michelangelo, I have rekindled the creative freedom I used to have. Food is definitely a place where you can express your creativity and I'm here to tell you that there is a good chance that there is a little voice in your head getting in the way of that. This needs to change.

  There are heaps of Sunday painters out there who don't give a shit about how good their work is, they just enjoy wandering off with an easel and sketching or painting whatever they fancy. I'm here to give you permission to go off and just enjoy yourself next time you step into a kitchen. Mess about! Who gives a toss what you produce? Treat it like an experiment or a bit of self-expression and if you feel the icy splash of cold water from the internal critic dampening your frolicking then you can tell them, from me, to go fuck themselves.

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Kirk out

Chefsebastian.com