The Space Between Wanting and Doing

The drawing tablet cost six hundred dollars and came in a sleek black box. I kept it, telling myself I might need it if I decided to sell it. I remember this because long after the tablet itself had migrated to the bottom drawer of my desk, beneath old phone chargers and receipts, the empty box remained on my shelf, sometimes staring at me. It seemed to hold some promise I dare not name.

Many years ago, I had the ambition to become a concept artist and illustrator. I downloaded every art app I could find and enrolled in three online courses. The tablet eventually collected dust while I wondered why my creative motivation had completely disappeared. It’s not that I lost interest in illustration, it’s that I chose the wrong level of commitment.

Last Tuesday, my neighbour offered me a bag of clay and some pottery tools. Three weeks earlier she had been talking about finding her true calling in ceramics.

It’s easy to create a fantasy for yourself about a new hobby. The simple enjoyment starts innocent enough. Then, it gets transfigured by a pressure you can’t quite locate. Somewhere between beginning and continuing, the fulfilment of doing the thing is overwritten by the need for outcome. Your motivation is like a bucket of paint. At first, it’s vibrant—achievement, curiosity, novelty and enjoyment all mixed together in a perfect shade of possibility. But left too long, it settles. The colours separate. One dominates. Maybe it’s the need for excellence. Maybe it’s fear. By the time you notice, the mix has already changed.

I’ve caught myself in this settled state often—staring at the gap between my taste and my ability, paralysed by comparison. I’ve read the best writers, watched artists turn blank pages into beautiful work in the time it takes me to sharpen a pencil. And still, I’m often blind to the fact that all of them must have had their own messy drafts too.

Sometimes we discover something that surprises us with delight midway through life, falling obsessively in love. Sometimes we carry something that has lived inside us since childhood. Either way, these things feel integral to who we are or wish we were. But these fantasies can become rooms we never enter, doors we keep meaning to open but somehow never do. When we peer through the crack, we only see giants on mountains—craftsmen who spent their lives climbing—and we both idolise and fear the journey ahead.

But I have come to understand that the obsessive path is not the only path to creative fulfilment. For many of us, it may not even be the right one.

When I first picked up illustration, I’d stay up drawing for hours after school until night fell. I believed I was going to be a concept artist. I watched videos, purchased books, joined forums. This went on and off for years while I studied design, planning to pursue art after I finished university. Instead, I landed a great design job. Yet I still felt the pull toward drawing, so throughout my career I took an anatomy course here, attended life drawing sessions there. Then I dropped it for years as I climbed the corporate ladder. One year I declared it was time and signed up to sell prints at an art market, having not touched a pencil in over a year. Somehow, I managed to produce a few prints and break even on sales, sparing my morale, if not my artistic pride.

Throughout all this, I did not achieve much in the way of art. But my passion for illustration stayed consistent, keeping that door open, that possibility alive.

I find myself wondering about the space between wanting and doing, and how much of my life I have spent in that space. This suspension may not be a failure, but a kind of wisdom I failed to recognise. I’ve come to see that there’s a spectrum of creative commitment—it’s not binary, but a sliding scale. I’ve noticed people tend to fall into different patterns of creative commitment:

The high commitment

The Obsessive – Your life is designed around your craft. It defines you. Your days are all practice.
The Craftsman – Quiet and focused. You work in your spare time, in the dark, often for the work itself.
The Entrepreneur – You build a business from your creativity. Hustling, monetising, learning on the fly—turning passion (or curiosity) into profit.

The medium commitment

The Self-defined – “I am a photographer,” “I’m a writer.” Your creative pursuit is part of your self-definition, even if you only engage with it occasionally.
The Coach – You’ve built skill and experience and now share it. Maybe you left a job or you’re in transition. You teach as a way to stay close to the craft.
The Social Casual – You do it for connection. A life drawing group, a book club, a band practice. It keeps you in motion, but gently.

The low commitment

The Enjoyer – You do it purely for joy, with zero pressure to improve or perform.
The Dabbler – You try things out, bounce between interests, chase novelty.
The Observer – You don’t engage, but you consume. You watch videos, follow artists, stay curious—but at a distance.

There are people who build their entire lives around their craft. There are people who dabble on weekends. There are people who consume content about hobbies they never practice. I used to think this was a hierarchy, with the obsessives at the top and the dabblers at the bottom. Now I wonder if it is simply a spectrum of ways to stay connected to the things that matter to us.

We’re told to be willing to live on the easy side of this spectrum, that not everything needs to be our next divine calling. But I’m not sure this is advice as much as it is permission we need to give ourselves. It’s tempting to feel like you have to earn your place in a creative space. That unless you’re making money or getting recognition, you can’t really call yourself an artist. But that’s not true. Even if you thought it was going to be your one true calling, you don’t have to feel like a failure if it becomes something smaller, something that fits differently into your life.

I think about inconsistent efforts and how they are often dismissed as a lack of commitment, but maybe they’re something else entirely. Maybe they’re how we keep our dreams alive until we’re ready to give them proper attention. Maybe they’re how we stay in conversation with parts of ourselves that our daily lives do not have room for.

The key, I think, is finding a sustainable level of commitment rather than forcing an all-or-nothing approach. It’s good if creative pursuits drop in and out of your life. They’re like old friends who understand that love doesn’t require constant presence. You don’t need to be embarrassed by a lack of contact, you can rekindle your friendship with them again and again.

I’ve taken the tablet out of that drawer, brushed off the dust, and placed it on my desk. Sometimes, when I’m looking at it, I see its black surface and remember the weight of expectation, how heavy six hundred dollars of hope can be. But I also see the scars from the stylus, small scratches that catch the light. The evidence of trying. The time and intention I have spent navigating the distance between wanting to create and actually creating.

The box, though. I finally threw away the box.