Making art when you’re sad doesn’t make you a tortured artist. It just gives the feeling somewhere to go.

Sadness is not a credential and it is not a style. Making something while you feel low is a way of putting the feeling somewhere outside your own head, where you can look at it instead of only carrying it. The tortured-artist idea has this backwards, since it suggests the pain is the source and the work is the proof. You do not have to stay unhappy to keep making things.

If a heavy stretch comes, let it go into something small, a few lines, a rough recording, a page. Nobody has to see it. And if the heaviness does not lift, someone you trust is worth telling.