The More I Don’t Create, The Smaller I Become
It has been an effort to start writing this. I haven’t written a word since the beginning of January, when I had all this news to share, when I published my intentions for the year with a flourish, when this was the year I was going to show up but then… I can’t find the word. I was going to stay “stillness”, but stillness implies peace. What is a more accurate is that I backed myself up into my burrow, blocked off the entrance, and quivered.
I know I’m not in flow when I’m not sharing. When I’m flowy I’m tripping over myself with points I want to make on Stories, starting Instagram captions that turn into a blog posts, so much to say allatonce. When I’m not in flow it starts to not occur to me to share, I stop with the daily lists because there’s nothing really on them and then it’s been a month since I posted anything. It becomes a loop; I’m not in flow therefore I don’t write anything, then I’m not in flow because I don’t write anything.
Maybe it’s not fair to say that I simply quivered in the burrow. In January I did some pretty solid thinking. Which sounds like I’m being facetious, but it was important and necessary thinking. Last year (or really the last three) Simple & Season became a bit baggy – my motivations were being pulled in lots of different directions and I was at the point where I didn’t even know what it was I do, let alone anyone else figuring it out. I needed to tighten it up, draw back in all the threads and plait them into some sort of sensical braid. I needed to get back to thinking about this as a business, and so the work I did in January involved thinking and re-ordering and project plans.
Every month my newsletter includes a section of “links I’ve written and read”, and usually there’s a good selection of books and articles and blog posts but this month I had nothing to put in there. At first I opened some web browsers to hastily find something to stick in there, and then I was just honest. I have not written nor read anything in the last month. And I can make partly-true excuses about “CEO” thinking not being conducive to creative writing but ultimately this is cause as well as effect. I have not been creative, I have not published, because I have not been encouraging, feeding, nurturing it.
It feels like it shouldn’t be a big deal – it’s only a bit of writing, only posting on Instagram. But what it represents is your ability, your capability to do any of this. It represents consistency, and to stop creating this content leaves the door open for the creeping thoughts about how you’re not doing it, how you’re losing it, how nothing’s going to work. To be producing content is to be existing as a person with work to share on the internet, to be visible as a business – without it you are tied up in a shop with all the lights off.
It's all this, but it’s also you as a human. The more I don’t create, the more I don’t read, the more I don’t write, the more I become a smaller version of myself. The more I start to shrivel. The more the days simply pass me by. Even during times I’ve been heartbroken, times I’ve been scared, times I’ve been worried, I have felt more alive than during times when I’m not creating. When we say “it’s only a bit of writing, I’ll do it next week”, we are cutting off a little of our ability to thrive.
So it has been an effort to start writing this. It was two hours getting up and down and circling the internet and typing and deleting. It was texting a friend about how my one idea was “booorrrrinnngg” but that I had nothing else. And it was saying “I will write something today”.
The most annoying advice in all the world when you have creative block is to “just start”. Just start! “Ok well how do I just start from this ever-deepening hole in the ground? How do I just start when my brain is a barren wasteland of dust?”
Well - you open your Word Doc and you type “it has been an effort to start writing this”. You type “it has been 48 days since I had an idea”. You type “this has been the story of my abject failure”. You type, you type, you type. You decide you will write something today, and you do.
