On Collaboration

I've spent most of my creative life operating in two modes.

In one I explore independently, alternating between intense bursts of free experimentation and dormant periods of passive absorption. Both contribute to the craft in their own way, burning creative fuel (inspiration, personal experiences) while I push against reality's grounding influence (the limits of my skills, body, and available tools). The product is my individual legacy, and it grows in proportion to my effort.

The other mode is collaborative.

Healthy collaboration is to creation what a degree of freedom is to information. Given the same period of time, it allows inexpressible things to become expressible (picture a soloist vs a choir). It unlocks fidelity that is physically inaccessible to the individual (see: Schubert’s Fantasie in F minor). It reveals paths that were imperceptible to one or both parties, enabling futures that otherwise could not occur (imagine an improvisation between jazz musicians). The interaction between distinct, dynamic minds becomes the source and the structure.

The price is coordination. The ability to externalize your intangible internal state. The will to do so even when it risks misunderstanding or embarrassment. The courage to trust you'll be met by the same awareness and vulnerability you offer. Partnerships that operate this way tend to be both rewarding and successful, with an aura that's recognizable even to outside observers.

The subjective experience of this category of collaboration is a kind of perpetual motion machine, feeding back positively: whatever energy you put in returns with something extra no one involved can really account for. That feeding-back compounds the longer a partnership lives, amplifying the reach of your actions more strongly with every turn. When thoughtfully directed, its power can be staggering.

Of course the reverse is also true. Collaboration has its unstable forms, and they tend to follow familiar failures in coordination. The inability to understand yourself precludes your capacity to be understood. An unwillingness to be seen denies opportunities to be witnessed. Fear of betrayal destroys the potential for trust.

In its unstable form, collaboration enforces all the limits of independent creation and layers on the weight of failed coordination. Not only does it become more difficult to achieve things together, it becomes more difficult to achieve anything independently, and more confusing. Misalignment recursively reorienting against misalignment, with no stable reality to ground against. A kind of effortful paralysis ensues.

In my experience, these failed collaborations are often exercises in self-fulfilling prophecy. The person who fears being misunderstood isolates themselves and gets scapegoated. The person who fears betrayal prioritizes themselves and gets excluded. The rationality of their fear only matters slightly; if the belief is strong enough and reality permits it, the feared thing becomes the attained thing no matter what.

Put another way, these collaborations are expressions of belief, a kind of unintentionally honest meta-creation. They take the new dimension created by partnership and instinctively bend its shape toward the belief they can model most vividly (the outcome they fear). That information just gets encoded in the degrees of freedom available: the collaborative relationship, and the world around it.

I don’t mean to say fear has no purpose, or is inherently wrong. Fear protects us, and imagining futures we want to avoid can reveal choices necessary to avoid them. But taken as a primary tool for navigating the future, it easily tilts toward hyperstition. I think this is particularly true in dynamic, reciprocal systems like creative collaboration. This realization has shaped the stories I tell myself about the people with whom I, by choice or by circumstance, end up collaborating. It's changed the way I see the stories others tell themselves (or tell me about themselves). Most importantly, it's left me with a deep awareness of fear's presence and its world-building power.

Its twin, trust, is necessary to construct any future worth living in. We create according to the possibilities we permit, and when we create together that effect is amplified. Fear collapses potential toward outcomes none of us want. Trust creates space in which the futures we do want can grow, even as it reveals the possibilities we fear.

Our lot will be the world we have the courage to reach toward, not the one we run from.