Well, hello there. My name is Morgan Harper-Nichols. I'm an artist and a writer, and this week on the podcast, I'm sharing the most important lessons I've learned about life from the creative process. This is day two of five, so if you're just tuning in for the first time, you can go check out day one, which was shared on yesterday.

So whether you consider yourself to be

a creative person or not, I hope that these ideas and stories can encourage you and help you

on your journey as you prepare for whatever lies ahead. For whatever reason, the word accountability usually makes me feel a bit uneasy.

Maybe it's my type B personality or the fact that I am autistic and I often feel a lot of pressure to perform and do tasks that I may have a challenge doing. This concept of needing to be held accountable has always just felt very intense for me.

Merriam-Webster defines accountability as an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility

or to account for one's actions.

This is something I understand, and I can see the value of it. However,

if I'm being completely transparent, it has just felt like a really intense word for me. However, at the

same time, I knew that when I was starting to share my art and poetry in the world,

I needed to hold myself accountable.

I needed to hold myself accountable

to why I was doing the work that I was doing.

So I came up with this concept of one million poems.

I came up with this concept of writing one million poems for one million people

in my lifetime. So in case you're not familiar, in 2017, when I started making artwork and

poetry on my iPad, I started to invite people to share their stories with me via email or Instagram DM,

and you can still do that. I mostly check the email these days. The Instagram DMs have

gotten a little bit harder to keep up with. However, I created this project. I didn't even

give it a name. And I said, hey, you're welcome to share your stories with me and I will

respond to you with poetry and art as a way of just reflecting the emotion and the feeling that

that person was sharing with me as they shared their story. And I started doing this and I noticed that

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