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maia 𓆙

@maiaben

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○ writer & latina riding the wave of life with equal doses of passion and delusion
○ cofounder @creativeliving.world
Bend the limits of possibility ↓

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Universal likability feels like intellectual maturity. But it’s actually coordinated dishonesty with yourself about what you think.You’re writing for everyone and no one simultaneously, optimising for the most easily offended person in your imaginary audience.The social cost of being disliked feels high. But the creative cost of strategic vagueness is catastrophic for everyone. Especially you.You make yourself so smooth that nothing about your thinking is distinct enough to be recognised. Your ideas lose their edges. You can’t access your best thinking because your best thinking lives in the specificity you keep filing down.Sartre called this “bad faith”. Not choosing a position, choosing the performance of not having one. Which feels safer until you realise: the cost of never being disagreed with is never making work that matters.People conform when information is absent or ambiguous. Everyone adjusts their position to match what they think the consensus is.But if everyone is doing this, the “consensus” isn’t real. We’re all performing agreement, following rules, witnessing systemic oppression and turning away for social brownie points that aren’t real.Artists have always had the skills required to disrupt accepted thinking. To live a creative life IS to contribute your truth. Not recklessly. But after rigorous interrogation.When you ask “when is this not true?” “who does this exclude?” “whose lived experience contradicts this?” you strengthen your position enough to stand behind it publicly. You can more easily accept being disliked for ideas you’ve tested.This creates an upward cycle. Better thinking. More honest work. Ideas worth defending. Creative practice that feels fulfilling to sustain.When you practice strategic vagueness to stay universally liked, you’re not protecting yourself. You’re severing access to the depths where your best work lives.Letting go of the need to be liked isn’t just noble. It’s necessary. Your creative life depends on it.In Creative Living, we practice, interrogate & share our thinking, in progress. We need your best ideas. Now more than ever. Comment 🦋 to join the waitlist, exciting news coming soon. by @maiaben

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7 months ago

@maiaben sent me a voice note at 2am about revolution and graffiti and I haven’t stopped thinking about it.She was wandering the streets of Paris, messages of anarchy spray-painted across government walls. And she just said:“So many people talk about revolution, but can’t even articulate what they’re fighting for. Instead of repeating the copy-of-the-copy we think is radical... what if we wrote something new?”And she’s right.We’ve become so good at performing our movements, we’ve forgotten how to practice them. To nurture them. To write from them.🌀 Revolution doesn’t happen by arguing with people who don’t want change. It happens when you speak clearly enough that the people who do can find you.It happens when you get so precise with your language, so true in your vision, that others can recognise themselves in it and decide to help build it.Real free speech doesn’t exist so we can scream louder.It exists so more people can exist freely. It exists as proof that everyone matters.If you’re a creative, an artist, a communicator, a leader:this is what your work is here to practice, now more than ever.🌀Sitting with complexity without shutting it down🌀Stamina for disagreement without dehumanisation🌀Articulating what you’re for, not just what you’re against🌀Understanding that accountability isn’t persecution, it’s relationshipWe believe artists, writers, creators can change the world.We believe they already are.And we believe the ones who do it best are the most precise.They can hold nuance without betraying the movement.They can imagine futures that include everyone’s freedom — not just their own.That’s why their work catches. That’s why it lasts.That’s who Creative Living is for.Not people chasing performance or trying to go viral.But those willing to expand what’s possible through practice.Those willing to learn what they think so they don’t rely on being told by someone else.Those willing to take their creative practice as seriously as they do the gym, their diet, their personal development.Through rhythm.Through devotion.We begin October 20th. Come write the world you want to live in. Comment 🌀 for deets by @maiaben

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10 months ago

The starving artist isn’t a romantic figure.It’s a control mechanism.While we absolutely don’t need more billionaire artists extracting from culture & dominating conversations, we do desperately need artists who aren’t choosing between groceries and gallery submissions.We do desperately need the writers whose ideas could change the whole game.There’s a difference between wealth hoarding and sustainable creative living, empire building and community resourcing.There’s a difference between caring deeply that people see and respect your work and extracting everything you can from the people in front of you.We need big-hearted artists to make REALLY GOOD MONEY, to be seen and make space for bigger conversations, new perspectives, diverse viewpoints and lived experiences.Creative Living exists because we believe artists deserve resources. Capacity. The support and community to raise their voices.Not to hoard wealth or be chronically visible, but to redistribute wealth through revolution, truth and imagination. To get money back into the right hands. And to be seen enough to get paid well for their work.There is nothing dirty about wanting to be paid for your art.When you apologise for wanting to be paid, you’re not being humble. You’re ensuring that only those already resourced can afford to create. You’re keeping revolution in the hands of the comfortable.Your creativity deserves compensation, visibility, respect because it’s how different futures get built. It’s how we imagine beyond current systems. It’s how we practice new economies before they exist.Join the artists building sustainable practices without becoming the thing we’re fighting, creating work that feels important, fulfilling, BIG, without sacrificing themselves in the process.Creative Living is open. Comment 🌀 for the link.We need resources moving through artists’ hands because we spend them differently. We fund different futures. Let’s go? by @maiaben

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10 months ago

I hesitated before posting this.Not because I’m afraid of disagreement (byproduct of being best friends with @loismac_ ) but because the internet has become very good at flattening nuance. And because quite frankly I am wrecked.This isn’t a post about one country deserving more attention than another.It isn’t about comparing tragedies.And it certainly isn’t about asking anyone to carry the impossible weight of the entire world!!!It’s about something I noticed in myself after the earthquake:As a Venezuelan living in diaspora, with my entire family still there, I watched the last few weeks unfold with a very different nervous system.Something changed in me forever the moment the crisis stopped being another headline and became my own family on the phone. My big sister. My dad. My friends rebuilding the country. The streets I know by heart.None of us Venezuelans will ever be the same. And it made me wonder what years of living through a constant stream of wars, disasters, displacement and collective grief have done to all of us. Collectively.Not to our opinions, but to OUR CAPACITY. To our ATTENTION.And sadly, to our empathy. I’ve started wondering whether what we call empathy fatigue is sometimes something else.Whether we’re slowly training ourselves to feel in shorter and shorter bursts.Until the shortness doesn’t just shape how we consume the news, but how we meet our own life. And how we meet others. This isn’t a conclusion. This is all oh so raw and its an observation I’m still sitting with. But i know one thing for sure: I don’t want all of us to “consume” more suffering or “stay on the loop”I don’t think that’s the answer.Today, I don’t have an answer and maybe i never will. I just don’t want to lose the ability to stay with what is real because we’ve built a society that rewards us for moving fast and feeling almost nothing.1$ still makes all the difference while we rebuild the country, and @impaktemos + @ayudanditoo has been doing the impossible to give back. by @maiaben

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15 days ago

No revenge bc this is my job 🤍🦢 more substantial caption incoming lmao seriously no words but for now, back to the temple with these 15 baddies all week 🏛️🪉 by @maiaben

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a month ago

I love the quote “everything you desire is at the other side of fear”, and since @loewwi mentioned that the only reason why we could co-host a retreat with @isabelgeorginataylor and be in Greece with 12 incredible women was because “we were intense on the internet”, ive been thinking about how much we loose in life at the cost of being seen as “too x”. But every time you say no to a bigger version of you, you say yes to a shrunken one. Be “too much.” Be “intense.” Be “cringe.” Be it all. But for the love of all wild things, don’t be stuck in a little box you shrink yourself into.So go be your divalicious self and shatter that box 🏹 by @maiaben

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2 months ago

Women that will shatter the box you’ve shrunk yourself into every time you are with them. Women that will speak about you in rooms you haven’t been in yet. Women that see your potential even when you can’t see it yourself. Women that will see the strength it’s taken to be this soft. 🌹 by @maiaben

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2 months ago

The day you plant the seed is not the same day you eat the fruit. The (first) A State to Create Retreat has been living proof of the work of years and years coming to fruition. Next round loading @perma_serifos ? by @maiaben

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2 months ago

When your body of work starts to exist outside of you. I am still lost for words for what it has felt like to host this retreat with Isabel. to be here, with these incredible humans, in this dreamworld (@perma_serifos 🪽) and teach this work we’ve been not only teaching, but living. The embodiment of all of our studies, our life experience, and honestly something else I can’t quite name yet. something far more mystical and ancestral than “knowledge.” Words will come. But for now I am on my knees in gratitude for every life choice that brought me to exactly this. More than ever, I feel it in my bones: there is nowhere else I’d rather be, nothing else I need to do. Clarity, like never before. And an incessant wave of devotion washing over me to keep this flame going for as long as we live by @maiaben

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2 months ago

Fuck the algorithm.Fuck the dance, the smile, the small soft voice you have been making for an audience that was not, even on its best day, invested in your creative fulfilment.Fuck questioning yourself and flattening yourself and bending yourself to the very whims of everyone and anyone who might pay you just a smidgen, a mere modicum, of attention.Fuck the part of you that has been editing your real ideas down into ones the feed will recognise, the bio will fit, the niche will accommodate, the right person at the dinner party will tolerate without changing the subject.Fuck the version of your life where the most interesting thing about you is the second most interesting thing you’ve allowed yourself to say.Fuck the part of you that thinks they have to get good before they get wholly and completely obsessed.None of it matters.Not the trends. Not the engagement. Not the open rate. Not the eleven people on Threads who would, if they could, prefer you slightly more agreeable. Not the standards. They will not, when you are seventy-three, be the ones who knew what you actually came here to do, say, be.This is your idea. This is your work. This is your creative life. This is the one body, the one mind, the one absurd and finite stretch of being alive that you get.You make the rules. This is your playground. You set the standards. You decide what is worth being possessed by, and you decide how long you stay in the room with it.The work that lasts has never, not once, in the entire history of creative work, come from a person trying to be reasonable about it. It has come from people who let the thing ruin their plans, mess up their week, embarrass their friends, derail their otherwise seemingly reasonable progress, and absolutely refuse, even at the very end, to be tidied into something the general public could comfortably recommend.That is the assignment.That has always been the assignment.Stop trying to master it.Let it ruin you a little.That is what it came for.And you never know, you might even like it.((Background image credit: A Riso-printed publication by Carmen Gray deconstructing the 1983 film Sans Soleil by Chris Marker)) by @maiaben

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3 months ago

A world that cannot create cannot feel. A world that cannot feel cannot face itself. A world that cannot face itself cannot imagine, or tolerate, anything beyond what already is. And a world that cannot imagine will destroy what it cannot tolerate.After a while, for the small thinker, anything unfamiliar starts to feel like too much.There is a way to remain informed but also remain open to change. And that comes from creativity, imagination and belief.A generation of brilliant, well-read, deeply thoughtful people have spent the last decade being trained out of the only faculty that could have built an alternative future: our own imagination. We have been trained, instead, into a permanent state of being informed. Outraged. Engaged. Sickened. Despairing. Disgusted. Aware. All of which, it turns out, slowly turns us into the very things we stand against.And all of which, it turns out, kill hope for a better future.But there is hope in every person who has decided, this year, to start building something in their actual life. There is hope in every artist who has refused to become reactive. There is hope in every writer who has chosen the slow honest work over the fast outrage. There is hope in every founder making something the algorithm cannot recommend, every teacher refusing to flatten their curriculum, every parent raising children who can sit with complexity, every community organiser doing the work that does not photograph well.There is hope in the fact that imagination is renewable. We can, even now, even after years of attempts to train us out of it, get it back. We can get hope back. It atrophies in months. It returns in weeks. The infrastructure is still there. It is just, in most of us, currently buried under several years of compulsive intake and mindless consumption.The opening ceremony is in 10 minutes. The eight weeks begin Monday.A Mind of Your Own starts now.Comment 💙 and you might just still squeeze in. by @maiaben

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3 months ago

PLEASE DO NOT BE SO FUCKING FOR REAL.PLEASE BE SO FOR UNFUCKINGREAL THAT THE HEAVENS WANT TO VISIT EARTH JUST TO GET A GLIMPSE OF YOU.Time to be so fucking delusional that when, decades from now, somebody asks you how you did it, you will look at them, genuinely puzzled, and say: Oh. I just decided I was going to.Are we really going to hand the next decade over to the small, bitter voice that has been calling our most interesting ideas grandiose since we were twelve? Are we really going to keep softening, hedging, qualifying, deferring, being practical, until we are, all of us, perfectly indistinguishable from each other and from the algorithm that sorts us?We cannot. We must not. We will not.The last chance to join the Mind of Your Own Creative Living live intensive for $100 off is now.We’re about to go into the depths of our souls and find out what we actually came here to be.We’re about to take our thinking back from the last decade of being told who we are and what to do, and made to feel like we’re unreasonable just for being thinkers.We’re about to get so fucking delusional, together, that the collective vibration from our ludicrousness will create a shift none of us even realised was possible.Are you coming?Comment 💙 you’ll get all the details straight to your inbox. by @maiaben

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3 months ago