Fears For A Creative Revival
It could have gone one of two ways. I couldn’t call it, before the move, what was going to happen to my creativity after it. Either it was going to catch fire, or it was going to smoke away to a barely scorched log.
This was, I realise, the longest move in history. The decision was made in November but it didn’t happen until April, something there were good reasons for that now I can’t quite remember. I think I needed to retain just a little more independence a little while longer, feel like I had seen it out. But the downside to that was my life for those five months took on a temporary air, an unsettling descended across everything as I began to talk in the language of “when I’ve moved”.
None of which gets the creative juices flowing, exactly. It seems to lower the sluice gates, signalling that there is no space for that flow of creativity, that there isn’t room or resources to deal with it. Which, as you get to the bitter end of moving, when your night time thoughts are dominated by “what shall I do with that jumper?” and “what needs to go in the box with the kitchen stuff?”, is true. There is no space to deal with the world’s best idea.
My fear was, having hung suspended in the temporary for so long, I’d be able to shift out of that way of being. In a way it’s a comfortable place to be, because you have the best excuse in the world not to do anything. You can’t possibly do anything, no matter how much you want to – gosh darn it. And it’s easy to continue existing in this place because there are always so many good reasons to.
My other fears were that, living with my parents I would regress into teenagerhood, or that I’d feel like I was on holiday. Having had lots of conversations and intentions about remaining an adult, and given that my teenage self was actually more conscientious than I am now, it was the latter that was the greater risk. For the last six-ish years, I have come here for a holiday. Weeks over Christmas or the summer to catch up with friends and family, have my dinner cooked for me and not do any work whatsoever.
And all my fears came to pass.
My mum wondered when I was going to fit some work into all the social plans I’d made. I wondered it too. But I told myself it was ok because I’d just moved, and in a few weeks I’d be off on holiday with my boyfriend, so really there was no point starting anything. Extending my cosy, temporary status, feeling the sunshine novelty. “I deserve a break” I thought, whilst also knowing that I didn’t actually want one.
What I wanted, really, was to feel a little more in control, a little more like things were moving – a smallest crack under the sluice gate so I could see the water was still there. So I sat down and wrote something, anything. I did it just to remember I could, just to follow through on an intention.
But it turned out the pressure of the water had been building, and that also making such an intention was not a crack in the sluice gate – it was an unleashing. I had another idea, and another. I started the Substack I’d been thinking about for a year. My Notes app is littered with one sentence, highly “??!?!?!” punctuated scraps. There are Google docs and Google docs, new pages on spreadsheets. A sense of what this is all becoming.
Which makes it sound like the opening of the gates set in motion a continuous gushing, a never ending stream of creativity. The case is more that there have been a few intense spurts, that give way to trickles, that then get faster and slow again. Before I go to bed (always before you go to bed) I will have to frantically jot down things I’m afraid I won’t remember in the morning, whereas actually getting to the point of writing this post has taken stop start hours. That is just how it goes.
But on the whole, I am pleasantly surprised with how work and creating is going so far. At how I can sit down at this desk in this light bright corner only centimetres from my bed and do good work; feel motivated to do that good work. But mostly, I’m pleasantly surprised at how I pulled myself back from the brink. At how I manage to dissuade myself from believing all those extremely good excuses and sense the weaker part of me that was whispering “no, I’m ready, let’s start”. Because it is just a start. But a start is much better than nothing.
