Self-care in December: nourish
December is a challenging month on all fronts – professional and personal – that it can be easy to get lost in all the activity and things to be done and forget to look after yourself. All this month on the blog I’m going to be taking self-care as my inspiration and looking at ways you can look after yourself a little better. I’m going to be sharing ideas for finding energy and preparing for the new year in your creative practice, and suggesting ways to support your mental wellbeing. No matter how much you’ve got going on with work and family this month, the goal is to reach January feeling fresh and ready for the new year, not exhausted and in need of recuperation.
Today I’m looking at a fundamental aspect of managing your personal wellbeing: nourishment
Self-care in December: gathering
December is a challenging month on all fronts – professional and personal – that it can be easy to get lost in all the activity and things to be done and forget to look after yourself. All this month on the blog I’m going to be taking self-care as my inspiration and looking at ways you can look after yourself a little better. I’m going to be sharing ideas for finding energy and preparing for the new year in your creative practice, and suggesting ways to support your mental wellbeing. No matter how much you’ve got going on with work and family this month, the goal is to reach January feeling fresh and ready for the new year, not exhausted and in need of recuperation.
Today I’d like to think about one of the most important elements of sustaining your creative practice: gathering.
The impulse to save
It is often around this time of year that I feel a slight shift, as the daylight is in short supply and winter feels close at my back. I notice that I switch from feeling full of energy for being outside, and doing things, to wanting to hibernate. I resist this temptation for as long as possible, but experience tells me that I will eventually succumb and it will be hard to muster the motivation for more than the bare essentials of living and working. Luckily the weather here in London at the moment is incredibly mild and the sun, when it’s out, is still golden and glorious, so I don’t need much encouragement to be out in the world. But I can feel it, waiting. And it’s got me thinking about this tendency to draw in, to hold on to things, to save stuff.
I don’t think anyone would argue with the impulse to squirrel ourselves away in winter, to stay cosy and enjoy the benefits of central heating and twinkly lights. But, what about when that desire to curl up starts to permeate into other areas of your life, like your work or your creative practice? What then? Where is the balance between healthy, natural protective behaviour (like retreating in winter) and things that don’t help at all?
Books to inspire: Art & fear – observations on the perils (and rewards) of artmaking
In last week’s post on Acknowledging the Fear I mentioned the book Art & Fear: observations on the perils (and rewards) of artmaking. It’s such a helpful little book that I thought it deserved its own post. So here it is…
Acknowledging the Fear
Once we’ve started on our creative journeys things aren’t necessarily easy. It can be tempting to think that just because you’ve finished your BA or MA things will slot into place, that just because you’ve found the material or technique/process that excites you, the work will be made easily, that just because you’ve made the work it will find its audience. We know it’s not that simple. There are so many things that can get in the way. In this post I’m going to be looking at one of those internal barriers to a creative life running smoothly – fear – and seeing if the words of other creative people can help us to find a way to live with the fear and to find the courage to create in the way we need to.
Fear is a part of the creative life. Who doesn’t feel slightly afraid when they start a new body of work, accept a commission, take part in a big show or exhibition, talk about their work in public? The low-level anxiety that comes with the thoughts ‘can I do this?’ or ‘surely this time they’ll realise I can’t do this?’. Luckily this low-level anxiety tends to get swept away in the action of doing the work, soon we’re too far in it to be worried. But what of the fear that permeates your creative life, that causes you to feel reluctant to start on the big work, those secret big dreams you have for your own practice? How do we deal with that, because it’s that insidious fear, that lurks waiting for quiet moments to pounce, that will really kill dead your biggest ambitions for yourself.
Reconnect with your purpose
In last week’s blog post I recommended Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, a short book of advice from one established artist to another at the beginning of his journey. There are many threads within his letters, but Rilke, in particular, seems to advocate cultivating inner strength and a sense of purpose that can only come from yourself, not from others:
Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then assume this fate and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking after the rewards that may come from outside. For he who creates must be a world of his own and find everything within himself and in the natural world that he has elected to follow.
I have been thinking about this notion, of gaining inner strength and through that reconnecting with the purpose to your creativity. I don’t think I know any creative person who does not have doubts about what they do. Sometimes it is only in small ways, when a particular piece of work isn’t working, other times it can be far-reaching when a crossroads is reached and the inevitable ‘what am I doing with my life?’ question appears. These doubts are natural. So, if we accept that, what can be done when we feel them? How do we find a way through the worries and out of the other side, to a place where we can continue?
3 elements of your Creative Practice: nourishment
Last week I talked about a structure for thinking about your creative practice which I have borrowed from the DIY MFA writing programme and made applicable for most creative practices:
Output (Creative Work) + Input (Nourish Creativity & Skills) + Community Building = Creative Practice
In the first of 3 posts I’m going to look at Input – the things you do as a creative person to feed your creative well, to nourish your creativity.
Creative practice and mental health
This week it’s Mental Health Awareness week. So my twitter feed (in particular) has been full of really interesting events and activities that link my main interests of Craft and Art with a topic that is close to me personally – maintaining good mental health. On a beautiful day like today the heavy grey days of winter seem long gone, and my struggles with SAD are thankfully over for a while. But I still grapple with anxiety and on-and-off low level depression that slows me right down or puts me out of action, no matter the season. I’m pretty certain that everyone deals with their own unique combination of mental health issues, and that we all sit on that spectrum. How much they affect your day-to-day functioning seems to be the deciding factor in how open we are about it with other people. I know I don’t really talk much about it (beyond a few blog posts) with people outside of my family and friends, which makes me sure that if we were all more open about things, then maybe we would no longer need a ‘week’ to highlight how much people deal with on a daily basis.
Books to inspire: Playing Big
This month’s book recommendation comes with a caveat. Not because it isn’t very good (it really is) but because I feel a bit awkward recommending a book which is aimed so squarely at only half the population. My aim with highlighting books on my blog is to share what I’ve been reading and the things I’ve found enjoyable, provoking and inspiring with the hope you might find them similarly helpful. This book is one of the few ‘personal development’ books I’ve read when I felt like it was written about me, and about people I know. So I couldn’t not tell you about it, despite its narrow focus. I hope you’ll forgive me this once, and I hope you’ll consider reading it no matter how you gender-identify; there are good insights for all in it.
Take it easy on yourself
When I started the blog I naively thought that I would be able to write 3 blog posts a week on 3 different topics. After all, I had lots to say; lots of ideas to share and lots of experiences with makers that I thought other people might find interesting and/or useful. Well, that thought quickly got scaled back when I realised just how much effort it is for me to maintain the routine of posting once a week. Yes, I did have lots of content that I could share, but once most of that was covered, and I had to think up new things on a regular basis- in amongst all my other work and travel- it wasn’t as straightforward as I’d imagined. You’d think that the once-a-week plan would be simple too, but the number of times I’m pulling something out of the bag late on a Tuesday (or even on Wednesday itself) because I’ve only just realised that I have to post something tomorrow! It’s almost comical.
When this happens, which is more often that I would like, my first instinct is not to help myself and be kind: ‘That’s ok Melody, you’ve been busy this week, what can we do now that will make this easier?’ No, instead, it’s to berate myself: ‘You’ve only got to come up with one post and you can’t do that on time!’ You see I hold myself to outrageously high standards and expect myself to meet them all the time, no excuses.