(via House of Turquoise)
This look is gorgeous. But my first response is: “I could never put a room that looks like this together, because I don’t know enough about interior design or paint.”
This is my block. What’s yours?
Food. Spending money. Sex. Work. Entertainment. “Woe is me” outlook.
The list is long. We are VERY CREATIVE about blocking our creativity. If only we could put that energy to better use.
I think we can. It’s just figuring out what we use to block. Not what others do (it’s so easy to point out in other people, isn’t it?), but what we do as individuals.
I have spent a good five years collecting information. I’m insatiable. I buy books, I read piles more that I’ve checked out from the library. I surf the Internet, I sign up for courses, I buy supplies. I stack study materials like a fortress in my office, because they make me feel safe. They make me feel invincible, smarter, leveraged, equal.
I am good at blocking my creativity by worrying (CONSTANTLY) that I don’t know enough about everything. If you’ve read this blog for the past five years, you have seen this trend at work. You have noticed that I worry a lot about knowing more than other people. That I seem to be afraid that the world has finally left me behind in the dust. It’s a major insecurity for me. One that now I get to conquer and push through. I’ve learned enough. I know way too much random information about social media, marketing, publicity, blogging, books, publishing, copyediting, grammar, ad infinitum. And that list is only what I’m trending to right this minute. Tomorrow, I’ll have a veritable smorgasboard of new factoids to share that have nothing to do with any of the above. It’s to the point, I’m crammed so full of information that I’m snarky. Thus I need chocolate . . . cookies. (Which brings us to ANOTHER brand of super-secret creative behavior: food.)
So now, that I’ve bared my soul, what’s your issue? Whatcha got going on in there? A friend of ours is in the military and scared to death. Not of war, or of dying, but of testing out so high on his exams that they put him in the top-ranked training school and pay him to go there. He’s scared. Not of failing, but of success! So he’s failing on purpose, doing stupid little things to make his commanding officers downgrade him to a safer course, something he’s not so petrified of. The thing is: he’s brilliant! He’s so, so, so, so smart. The toughest exams bore him. He aces papers without even studying.
It’s hard to watch this unfolding. It’s hard to realize that some people can’t take the heat. They are gifted, brilliant, created to be amazing, and they fold early. They GIVE UP. They actively BLOCK in order to take a gigantic U-turn in their life. They have this daydream that life BEFORE this huge dream, before they undertook this endeavor was easy, was blissful, was peace.
Ha!
Life is blissful and peaceful when you’re not fighting against it. When you’re letting go of your tight control on how much you can take. It’s a hard one for some of us–raised in strict religious patriarchy, with ridiculous rules about everything that did not matter and no help on things that did; we’re the ones who can’t loosen our grip. We’re the ones who struggle the most to be creative. Keeping the lid on was a defense mechanism we used to stay alive.
To those folks like me (and like my military friend), we don’t need the tight control any longer, right? We need to begin to join the real world and see that every single human being on earth has these same issues. Sure, most other people weren’t raised strictly religious, but they are still blocking and still trying to take those same U-turns. We all need to quit hiding in the shadows of the past and step out. We can’t control our life. We can’t control our future. We can’t control things to make sure everything goes just like we need it to.
And if we take time to look at what we’re using to block our creativity or make a creative U-turn, perhaps we can slowly wean ourselves off of that super-secret (or not so super-secret) creative behavior. Perhaps today we can accept that extra bit of self-kindness and not turn to those creative blocks that we’ve relied on for so long. Resist the spendy Starbucks run this morning, don’t buy more books (this is aimed directly at yours truly), quit hiding in the movie theater or watching lame reruns. Stop working 80-hour weeks. Go do the thing you’re avoiding. Just do it. Next time, we’ll talk about how to start, both emotionally and physically.
Action Tip: What will you do today? What would you do first instead of blocking or making a U-turn?
Comments on this entry are closed.