An unremarkable thing

Photo by Olga Thelavart on Unsplash

It’s embarrassing.

Here I am again (again), all blocked up and with no idea of how to get everything that’s inside of me out into the world. Today I learned a piece of work has been cancelled, and suddenly feel anxious, dragged to the precipice of the all too familiar existential dread that seems to arise when I’m not crazy busy.

And, with forty minutes until Nick comes to meet me and a ton of appointments tomorrow and the next day, and a full day out with a client the day after that, the only thing I can justify doing in the next forty minutes is writing. I may do some of it here, I might also open my notebook and do some of the homework from my coaching course. But it’s incredibly clear to me that the only thing to do is start again. Put words down, write out the rubbish, try, make an attempt at being creative while I’m alive.

All around me in the coffee shop I’m in, people sit with notebooks, ipads, pencils and paper. No doubt some of us are distracting ourselves, but it’s also obvious that I’m in a room in which people are learning, reflecting, thinking and creating. I want to be where the creatives are. I don’t think I’m one of them. I don’t think I deserve to call myself a creative person. At best, I think I give it a go, but in my mind, it’s quite clear that the ‘proper’ creatives are over there, within sight but out of reach, just as the ‘proper’ neurodivergent people are, the ‘proper’ consultants, the ‘proper’ parents, the ‘proper’ friends and the ‘proper’ women. I feel the same as them, but different enough that I don’t quite belong.

And yet, showing up to the possibility of being creative is one thing I need in order to make being alive feel worth it. All consumption and no creativity and I become incredibly depressed. Busyness over the last few months has been pretty all consuming and a welcome distraction; I’ve been quite overtaken by a client project for the past six months, which I think is now slowly winding down, leaving me with more space and a quiet, anticipatory dread at how I’m going to use – or waste – all that time.

The question posed by both my therapist and coaching group leader in the last few weeks is, “What is your greatest desire?”

I both know and don’t know how to answer that question. Funny, isn’t it, how we can inhabit both places? It feels incredibly difficult to write in an uncensored way these days, although I’m not sure it ever felt easy to, so loud is the inner critic - even with morning pages, writing no one else will ever see, she’s right there. I imagine people sneering at me, judging my self-indulgence, and yet every day that passes where I don’t write, dance, get on the yoga mat or DJ is another day notched up to Resistance.

So, fuck it. I’m embarrassed to be treading the same old ground, but I’m here and I’m going to write. I’m going to press publish, and I’m going to face my fears. Maybe I’m no good at this, and maybe I have nothing worth saying, but I’m going to do my best to show up and do it anyway.

Because when I see my stepdaughter give up on things that are tricky rather than persevere and practice, it hurts my heart. It’s so clear to see that with practice, the tricky thing will become easier, and I see her frustration, the perfectionism, the desire to be instantly good at the thing she’s trying to do. I feel helpless as I watch her tip into almost instant overwhelm and quit. I notice how she wants to soothe herself with a screen - and I’m not judging her, she’s 8 years old growing up in a digital world, but I know in my own life that screen time only goes so far to satisfy my soul.

I’m in a parallel process in my own life, only with 32 more years’ experience on the clock. When I see her in her pattern, it reflects my own to me quite starkly. I think I ought to know better, in all honesty. After all, she is a child, and it’s my job as one of her grown ups to help coach her through those moments, but I have to confess that when she hits her wall, I feel overwhelmed too. I’m reminded of all the times I hit a creative block in my childhood and didn’t know how to move forward; the half-written fiction books I started aged 10 haunt me to this day, and I still can’t figure out how the story would have moved forward, as much as I’d have loved to complete the third book in the Dinky Dino-Mite series.

Our patterns start really young, don’t they?

I know that a good life is not one in which I’m addicted to my phone, or throw hours away slobbing out in front of Netflix (although every once in a while, doing that feels good). A good life is one in which I’m in the arena of my life, taking creative risks, putting stuff out into the world, stumbling, flailing about but moving forward. Movement and Creativity were my two words for the year and so far, I’ve struggled to make significant space for either. Understandable in many ways, given how busy I’ve been, and my life is not completely devoid of them; my work is pretty creative, but I know I didn’t choose that word with my contracted work in mind.

So. Here’s a thing, a beginning and a continuation. Unpolished and unremarkable, but a definite thing. A thing that I, not AI, made. And for today, I’m letting it be good enough.