Finding The Creative Flow When You Feel Blocked

I've been fairly quiet on here lately. I created the website, added a few blog posts, and then...sort of disappeared. The reasons are simple, on the surface. I was working hard on the photography side of things, getting that corner of the website set up, and my daughter had a lot of stuff going on in her life and my husband and I were focused on helping her out and eventually moving her back home. All of this took time and attention away from writing. But there was more to it. I could have found the time to write several blog posts while all that was going on. But I didn't. I chose to do other things. I started a blog and then almost immediately put it on the back burner.

The truth is, I love writing. I started this blog because I know I love writing. I wanted an outlet for writing. I know that there are more things I want to say. But shortly after I started the blog, I found that I couldn't access my writing voice. I'd intend fully to work on a post, and then I'd have nothing to write. Crickets. I also found myself not able to write poetry, something I'd been working on fairly consistently for months. I spent a few weeks shaming myself for not having anything to say, and then I did my best to set that aside. I noticed that while my writing was feeling blocked, my photography wasn't. It was calling to me loudly and clearly. And very surprisingly, I was liking the idea of doing some gardening. I wanted to grow things. I bought some tomato plants, even though I have firmly told myself that I would not, under any circumstances, attempt to grow tomatoes again. Such lofty dreams are meant for those with much greener thumbs than I. But then, despite my wiser intentions, I found myself with two tomato plants. And then I lost my mind even more and bought seeds to grow green beans, carrots, and lettuce.

Honestly, I don't even know what happened.

I wasn't writing, and I was planting a vegetable garden. The world had turned upside down.

But I went with it, because it's easier to embrace the insanity than to fight it.

I spent the summer digging in the garden and playing with my family. I stood barefoot in the dirt and ate a green bean fresh from the vine. I sat on the patio for hours on Saturday mornings and soaked up the sunshine while I chatted aimlessly with my husband. I went on long walks to nowhere, and short strolls to get ice cream. I edited photos and sent them in to art shows around the country, just for kicks. I strutted around like a queen when those photos got accepted.

In short, I played. I let go of expectations to perform, and just went where it felt like fun. I let my creativity off the hook, and stopped asking it to show up when and how I wanted it to. Instead I asked it how it would like to play today, and I focused on finding the creative flow.

I told myself I would let go of all expectations for productivity over the summer, except for my newsletter, because I wanted to share with my subscribers how this all was going, and I'd pick up whatever I wanted to in the fall. Take the summer off to be with my family.

It turns out, it's not only kids who benefit from taking several weeks off from the usual grind. Adults need time to play too, and I don't mean to make a sexual innuendo when I say that, either. None of us are robots, designed to just keep producing over and over again. We are human beings, part of creation, and our needs have seasons just like the rest of creation.

The well-trained monkey in my head who keeps chattering away judgmentally no matter how many times I tell him to knock it off told me that I was slacking, that I was letting myself down by allowing myself to step away from my goals for a while. But the reality turned out to be the opposite. By stepping away for a bit, and allowing myself to go where it felt like fun, I was able to recharge my batteries. I could clear my head, and as my kids started getting ready to go back to school, the creative part of my brain started to look for new challenges again. My writing voice didn't automatically return, but the desire to write started to creep back in, along with the desire to play with words in other ways. I started dreaming about making memes using my poetry and my intuitive journal writing. And still I didn't rush right back into it. I sat with the stirrings and allowed them to build. I had promised myself I'd take the summer off, and I didn't want to break that promise to myself. So I waited, increasingly impatiently, until the first day of school came.

Now, I'd love to tell you that I immediately sat down and began writing prolifically, and creative genius poured out of me. Not so. Not even close. But I did sit down and began writing. I returned to showing up for my creativity at my laptop again, morning after morning.

And if I hadn't, that would have been okay, too. The point is simply to keep showing up, in whatever way feels good at the moment. If the desire to write hadn't come back at summer's end, that would have been perfectly fine. My break wasn't about "fixing" writer's block. It was about keeping my commitment to myself to keep showing up for creativity. Not in a particular way, just in whatever way I chose at that moment. That could look like writing a novel, or it could be staring at the clouds and finding images in them. It was about going with the creative flow, rather than trying to force it to go in a particular direction.

It's funny, isn't it, how we try to make creativity behave like an assembly line. We try to line everything up just so, neat and orderly, and then ask creativity to perform. And then we are shocked and disappointed when creativity doesn't follow our directions.

But creativity was never meant to behave like it. Creativity is a meandering line to an unforeseen destination, not a straight path to a predetermined goal. Our job isn't to straighten the line, but to learn to enjoy the surprises and left turns along the way to who-knows-where. It's not the easiest path, but it is a heck of a lot more fun.

Love,

Amy