It’s funny how many of us undergo similar existential and emotional crises in our creative lives, and yet we struggle to find common language to express our experiences.
Oh, inside our heads, the voices are busy and varied as ice crystals in a raging snowstorm. But externally? Meaning, out loud? Mmm. Calm. Cool. Collected.
I’m doin’ fine. You?
I want to turn this dynamic inside out—to get us to spill our guts a bit noisily. Not for the sake of showing off, or performing histrionics, or seeking attention. Rather, I’m more interested in encouraging us to share more (when it feels safe to do so), and to come clean about our collective angst.
We could all do with a bout of catharsis now and again—especially if that leads to recognizing that this artist business need not feel quite as lonely as it often does.
I recently had a chance to run an experiment along these lines in a real-time setting. I designed and led a short but intense workshop intended to help a room full of aspiring and practicing writers and poets to acknowledge shared doubts and seize on opportunities to manifest—and hopefully sustain—their creative identities.
To this end, I sought to normalize the existence of our self-doubts and anxieties around writing and creating by talking about what this feels like very openly. I told them that being an artist in Western culture isn’t, in fact, normalized (celebrities are not normal). We’re perceived as outsiders, told to stop daydreaming, or get a real job.
“No wonder you have doubts about your identity as a writer,” I said. “Creative people make other people uncomfortable, even people who love them.”
I mentioned a TV commercial where a pigeon types gibberish on a computer screen and says he’s working on his novel.
Oh, isn’t that a silly thing to do! Write a novel? Come on!
Many people don’t see the world as we do, I said. They don’t understand what we’re after, how our brains work.
They see books as commodities (on color-coded shelves!) and authors as successful only if they make a lot of money.
But that has nothing to do with being a writer. Or living a creative life.
The things we think about, care about, are hard to pin down. They’re happening on the inside.
So no wonder we doubt ourselves.
Our goal-driven, success-oriented culture doubts us too.
And I said to them:
If you long to sit by yourself and think, or write quietly, or read books and take notes…well, our culture says that’s a little crazy.
And you’re a little lazy.
But hear this:
You are not lazy.
You are an artist.
Ah, but talk is cheap. How to make any of this feel real to someone in the room? I hit on an exercise where I posed several revealing questions and asked everyone to raise a hand if the question resonated—and to look around and see all the other hands raised.
Raise your hand if…
· you have doubts, at least sometimes, about your ability and talent as a writer.
· you’re self-conscious about calling yourself a writer.
· you know people who look at you a little bit sideways when you tell them you’re a writer, an artist, or involved in anything creative.
· the thought of submitting or sharing your writing feels really scary…
And what do you suppose happened? Hands went up all over the room. A sure sign that we are living a sharable experience—which we’re not sharing because doing so makes us feel so darn vulnerable.
I offered tools, including a list of self-affirming mantras:
Nobody has the right to define who I am…
I am allowed to dream big…
I challenged everyone to list the internal and external obstacles that held them back from creating—and then challenged them further by asking them to write down steps they could take in the short-run and the long-run to address those obstacles.
I think I struck a nerve, in a good way. I sure hope so.
Manifesting a creative life takes work. Most of all, it takes believing in yourself—especially your right to lay claim to the time and effort and quiet space needed to write or make any other form of art.
Which brings me back to the out-loud nature of this topic. It’s incredibly hard to give yourself permission to do something that the world around you isn’t begging you to do. (Oh, yes, please spend the next two years writing a novel!)
It’s perhaps a tiny bit easier when you know that you’re carving out this identity alongside countless others seeking to do exactly the same thing.
The struggles are real—and the struggles can be shared.
Let’s start there.
If you’d like to access some of the components of my workshop, you can download it for free from my website: Manifest Your Creative Life.
And if you’d like me to run a version of this workshop for your writing group, or a group of creative friends from any discipline, just ask.
This is great. I taught a class just tonight in which we discussed what we thought were our strengths and weaknesses and how we could work with and around them. And I asked if there was one weakness that could look at differently and see as a strength. It was a galvanizing discussion!
I'm bookmarking this to have it close at hand to reread.