Tiny steps

I have been creatively blocked for the better part of a decade, if not two decades. These days, the list of obstacles looks kind of like this:

1. Anything I create should be useful or productive

2. I don’t want to waste art supplies on something that is not good

3. I need a beautiful space to paint and write

4. I need a lot of time to paint and write

5. Instagram

I will do anything - clean the whole house, cook for the whole week, organize kids’ clothes - before I sit down with the intention to create. And if I do sit down, I will find excuses to get up and then get up again. One of my procrastination tactics is listening to or reading stuff about creativity. Like tidying my desk, and the room in which it is housed, and the house in which the room is, learning about creativity is one more step on that giant staircase that most days, leads nowhere.

And so I started Liz Moody’s podcast episode on creativity being the antidote to burnout. I listened to it over three weeks - while packing boxes, while waiting in the school pick-up line, while cooking. And perhaps, because consuming it was such a choppy experience, (unlike reading Substack essays on creativity one after another until they bleed into each other), it stuck. This is what stuck :

Creatives are constantly experimenting with and expressing themselves in multiple forms. Writers paint, painters knit, designers potter. Of course I knew this in theory, but having it articulated by an expert somehow gave me permission to widen my own interpretation of what it means for me to be creative.

I am an extremely structured person, and can be goal-oriented to the point of obliterating everything in my peripheral vision. Once I was working on a deck (PowerPoint presentation for a client, in management consultant speak) late in the evening. I stepped onto the balcony for a cigarette and locked myself out. My husband in trying to unlock the balcony door, broke the handle, and really locked me out. While he mimed to me through the glass door that he was going to call building maintenance, I climbed over the balcony, scooted over six inches to my neighbors side and climbed over onto her balcony. We were 10 floors off the ground. She let me in and I walked back into my apartment to an apoplectic husband. I would rather have risked falling 10 floors than let an unforeseen event get in the way of my planned workflow.

As I’ve written about here, I’m trying to walk far far away from this mindset. I’m trying to unfurl, to let go of control a little, to be okay with a type-b way of being. Kids have helped accelerate this learning. They refuse to stick to a plan or let you stick to one. But I am still surprised by the ways in which rigidity shows up in my life. For me being a creative has always meant being a writer. In face I don’t think of myself as creative or as an artist. I’m a reader, an intellectual, a wannabe writer. The only creative pursuit I allow myself to indulge in, and that too with a lot of guilt, is writing. Anything else is a waste of time. Pottery is not going to get me that Pulitzer. Turns out, it just might.

So this week, I started experimenting. Before I leave to pick up my daughter, I set out her lunch and alongside it, two pieces of paper, two paintbrushes, two pots of water and a set of paints. Invariably, in the car she asks if she can watch TV when we get home. I say no and I offer her painting with mommy instead. So far, she has accepted with enthusiasm. Today she told me she wanted her baby and unicorn also to paint with us. So I set up two more painting spots and all of us painted while my son napped.

Today was Day 3 of this exercise and here’s what I noticed :

• It quietens the saboteur that wants art to be useful because this exercise is also serving the purpose of weaning my daughter from afternoon TV (a habit that came out of postpartum survival).

• We do this exercise in my least favorite room. It is neither beautiful, nor well lit, nor sparse. But I have accessed flow state all three days

• We stop after 15-20 minutes when she loses interest

• I use shitty A-4 colored paper that I want to get rid of before we move and the cheapest kind of watercolors. My daughter gets really excited about choosing colors. She wanted orange for herself, blue for her baby and pink for her unicorn today and my saboteur is happy that I’m not using expensive watercolor paper. And I’m getting more okay with using art supplies. Today I used two sheets of paper! Talk about going crazy!

• I was tired today and tried to slink out of the exercise when I saw she was occupied. I sat on the couch and opened my phone. But my daughter, sharp as a tack, immediately asked me to come paint with her.

Instead of using motherhood as an excuse to get out of creating, I have set it up to lure me into creating. I don’t always enjoy the act of painting. I am moderately good at it, so that means anytime I sit down to paint, the pressure is high. Painting with my daughter takes away that pressure. The act itself is enough. It doesn’t matter what comes out of it. And it feels “useful," to be spending time with her, to be there for that moment when she is ready to tell me that she cried in school today because she tried to snatch someone’s toy and fell over instead.

Some saboteurs are taken head on, others hoodwinked, until the practice and joy of creating begins to outweigh the fear.

These observations coincide with other insights from the podcast : that you only need to engage in a creative activity 15-20 mins, 3 times a week to unlock the benefits of creativity, that procrastination and perfection will get in the way, and that any act can be creative. This week I also tackled a bag of broken earrings that I have been carrying with me for 10 years in the hope that I will one day find someone to fix them. Today I fixed 80% of them myself. The tools had been there all along, today I could just look at them in a different way.

I still feel blocked, but I feel a tiny shift that maybe I am on the path out of here.