Can your soul be stolen? Authenticity, Imitation, and Creating From Within

There’s a strange ache that comes with watching your voice, your style, your creative fingerprint get lifted, watered down, and paraded around as if someone else invented it.

It happens more often than you’d think.

You spend years building a vision rooted in lived experience, shaped by your past, molded by your pain, through trial, error, and gut instinct. You pour your soul into your work. And then, like clockwork, someone comes along, sees the shine, and decides to wear it like a mask, marching around like they are in a parade.

At first, it’s subtle a caption that sounds eerily  familiar, a shoot styled almost identically, a post that feels like... are you watching yourself?

And soon, it’s obvious they’ve swapped out their voice for yours, hoping no one notices. But they do. Because while aesthetics can be copied, soul cannot.

There is no heartbeat in something you have dug up after death and try to breath life into.

Creativity that isn’t rooted in truth always flatlines. It might look good for a moment, but there’s no pulse behind it, no blood, no tears, no sweat, no lifeforce, or inner voice guiding the process. It’s all mimicry. And mimicry doesn’t build movements, it just follows them.

Let’s be clear there is a difference between inspiration and imitation.

We all take inspiration from others. That’s part of the beauty of the creative world. We see something that moves us, challenges us, wakes something up inside us and we alchemize that feeling into something entirely our own. That’s how influence should work. It becomes a bridge, not a wheelchair, not a crutch, not a theft.

What we see far too often is not admiration it’s envy. It’s jealousy wrapped in Pinterest boards. It’s someone with a dull, disconnected creative compass trying to rob the imaginative purpose of someone who actually has a vision. And it’s not just dishonest it’s sad.

Because trying to wear someone else’s spirit is exhausting. Trying to keep up with someone else's originality will always leave you in a creative desert, dying of thirst as any original thought withers away, shrivels up and is dissolved by nature...

For the fellow creatives reading this, Your originality is your currency. It’s everything about you! It is your force and your protector, it is your fears and your rage, it is your downfall and your grace, hope and dreams, your nightmares and your savior. Protect it, nurture it, own it. Don’t dilute your voice to blend in with what’s trending. Don’t let envy push you to replicate what someone else has built. Your power lives in what only you can say in the way only you can say it.

And for those on the outside looking in those who follow artists, photographers, writers, designers, creatives off all kinds, you can feel when the work is real. It hits different. It lingers. It speaks. That’s the power of something created within the belly of your own beast.

At the end of the day, the ones trying to copy the look, vibe, style, verbiage, will always be chasing. Because the truth? You can’t steal soul. You can’t fake purpose. And you can’t replicate something that was never meant for you to carry.

So let them try. Let them trace the outlines.

We’ll keep creating from the inside out with fire, with grace, with soul. Because that’s where the real magic lives. My lovelies go out, stir the pot and bleed out the sparkle that is your lifeforce by creating in your own voice with no shadows cast.