Dusting off the creative urge

drawing a starting line without an end in sight

Time to open the vein and bloodlet some words again. I always let it go too long. I wait until I’m spilling sentences into my notes app, starting a thought in one notebook and finishing it three days later in another. Then I finally let myself sit down and properly write, and every passing thought from the past month comes rushing out. I cannot go long without reaching for writing as a way to process.

There has been a lot to process. Loss is the latest character in my life. Autumn has been a muddle of months that I needed to just get through. It happens; sometimes, you need to slog through and survive for a while. Soon enough, the months arrange into a prettier pattern and you find yourself energised and joyful again. This season has just been a little harder to stomach than others.

Somewhere along the way, I flicked the switch from ‘create’ to ‘absorb’ mode as a means of Just Keeping Going. It’s part of the mental mechanics of hibernating. Creativity takes a backseat – it requires energy of you, and that energy has been going elsewhere. You pack up your paints and close your notebooks. You watch TV. You wrap your hands around hot mugs and focus on your breathing.

For me, creativity moves in ebbs and flows, and there are seasons of consumption and seasons of creation. You can’t write well if you don’t read; you can’t write music without listening to it, and so on. I’ve been absorbing a lot, folding new stories into myself, and now I am feeling ready to lay down some ideas of my own. The cogs are slowly shifting and resettling before the pistons fire up again. There’s plenty to Get Through still, but there’s a difference; I feel up for the challenge of doing my best again, not just doing the bare minimum. I know what the path of least resistance is right now, and I know I could feasibly take it. But I don’t want to anymore! Instead, I want to lock myself in a chamber with my creativity and wrestle until one of us knocks the other out. I want to be the one on the ground.

Last weekend, I sat and painted for the first time in months, scratching that side of my brain that loves to get lost in the flow state of focus. It was a simple drawing, using acrylic marker pens that behave like paint but thankfully require none of the clean-up. I painted some loved-up pigeons, just because. I liked them. They have been my warm-up birds, the first toe I’m dipping back in the creative pool.

Cou-cou

Sometimes, making things is energising. And sometimes, when you’ve been raised with the protestant-work-ethic-meets-capitalist-society ethos of needing to have something to show for your time, making things feels heavy with expectation. You feel pressure on your creative pursuits. You tell someone you paint for fun, and they ask if you’ve ever considered monetising the hobby. Or starting an Instagram account. Or an Etsy. Or or or, anything to maximise and optimise and capitalise on the thing that brings you peace.

This attitude is etched into your bones, too. You are trained to ask yourself: what can you show for those hours spent swimming in the right side of your brain? After all, achievement is king in this land. Not just any achievement, either: why draw the line with ‘done’ when you could strive for ‘perfect’? An all-or-nothing dichotomy like this is both unhelpful and unoriginal, but it’s enticing. Why do anything if it doesn’t lead to achievement? Why try if you can’t live up to the most exacting standards? Why start something at all? To what end? To what end?

I know logically that pressure can be a hindrance and not a help, and I often tell my friends so when they fret about the result rather than the process of things. But it is hard to take that advice and really believe it. I’ve tangoed with this feeling many times, getting over it and then being knocked back by it again – the first draft of a novel sat in my drawer is testament to the fact I can move past it. But the fact I can’t make eye contact with said novel now, because draft two is when things get real and I have to come to terms with my mistakes, shows that I do still spy with that cruel perfectionist’s eye.

So, it stands to reason that absorption is the easy option when life gets tricky and I don’t have the emotional energy to go back and forth with myself like this. Creative hobbies fall to the wayside, because the existential pressure of making something from nothing is too heavy to hold daily in my hand.

My unexpected solace, in the place of creative pursuits, has been learning to run. In August, during a period of having a lot to process, I went for a walk one day and felt such an itchy, anxious energy that I just started jogging, surprising even myself. Since then, I have been jogging a few times a week and enjoying it.

I am unequivocally not made for running; I don’t have the build, it doesn’t come naturally to me, and I’ve always avoided it, knowing from school sports days that I’ll reliably come last in any race. But there is something beautifully refreshing now about letting myself be bad at something. I’m expecting absolutely Zero from myself, and that’s not a situation I’m in often. I am so slow, I get lapped by pensioners (although pensioners in South-West London are admittedly speedier than most). I sweat buckets as I inch around the park at snail’s pace. But privately, I’m just amazed that I’m there at all.

Once I reached a point where I could pretty reliably jog 5km, I decided to work up to 10km. I downloaded an app that narrates your runs, giving you tips and checking in on your distance. I have to admit that the first time I tried it, I almost had to turn it off because of the American earnestness of it all. Dear Coach Bennett from Nike Run Club was simply too cheesy for me to handle. But I stuck with his gentle urging for one run, and another, and soon I found profundity in the cheese.

As cringey as Coach Bennett’s aphorisms are, they’ve made a runner out of me. One of his catch-phrases is “I’ll see you at the next starting line,” because the hardest part of a run is showing up. And showing up for something, even something bad (a run you can’t finish, a painting that goes wrong, a chapter that doesn’t land) is still better, and makes you better, than never having shown up at all. Coach Bennett has reminded me of the simple fact that I logically know and emotionally still struggle to believe: you need to let yourself try.

Sorry for doubting you, Coach Bennett <3

So. Ahoy. With my pocketful of positivity in tow, I am on a voyage to dust off my dormant creativity, and I’m going to do it by easing the pressure all the way off. Will I be doing The Artist’s Way? No. I want to follow my gut on this one, and besides, I’m tired of quantifying my personal goals. I’m already balancing a Jenga tower of habit-stacking and arbitrarily numbered goals to achieve by the end of this year, and I’m not convinced that having targets enhances enjoyment. Enjoyment is what I’m going for here. Reawakening my creativity is something I want to do just for the sake of doing it – not to any other end.

I have been gearing up. Now, I’m going to lean into the brilliant burn of trying quite hard and maybe, very probably not having anything to show for it. The starting line is here, and there’s no end in sight.