Looking back to get unstuck
I’m feeling stuck. It’s Tuesday evening and I need to write a blog post for Wednesday, my arbitrary, self-imposed deadline. I really don’t want to miss a week and yet I can’t think what to write. The last couple of weeks have been a bit of a struggle in terms of work/life/creative me balance. Events in my personal life are derailing most of my attempts to get work done and as for creative things… well, they’ve ground to a halt. The creative well is dry and no amount of scraping around at the bottom, hoping for something miraculous, is going to help me right now, to write this now. I need a quick fix.
I am fully aware that this is not an ideal situation. I know that I should have been topping up my creative stores with inspiring and nourishing activities, feeding my curiosity and paying attention to the little things. But we are all flawed humans, none of us is perfect, and despite knowing what we ‘should’ do, we often don’t manage it. I have a note in my diary to remind me to be kind to myself, so no berating today. Instead, what small act can I do to help? How do I unstick myself when there isn’t time to gently revive my flagging creativity? I look back.
What is my creative practice?
I am not sure that the work I do with makers and other creatives, in supporting their creative practices, counts as my own ‘creative practice’. There are many things I do which stretch me creatively, and there are certainly things which I consider I have created, which would not exist otherwise. But is it the same as a creative practice where I make things – objects or ideas? Over the past couple of years I have struggled to reclaim my making practice (I’ve blogged about that here and here), and there’s still a long way to go on that front. But I also have a writing practice and that sometimes feels overlooked, undervalued.