I have a million ideas about the dumbest things all the time. It usually starts with, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” at which point whatever captive audience I have at the time will usually roll their eyes.
I can tie a song lyric to the statement you just made. Give me a few minutes of conversation and I can usually come up with some decent brand messaging or a company name for your product or service.
There is no question that I am creative.
Creative on command? Nope.
I wrote recently about the impact grief can have on creativity, but I didn’t talk about the frustration that follows when a usually creative brain becomes unusually uncreative.
Today, I’ve been staring at an open InDesign spread for an hour. I’ve gone through my “inspo” folder four times. I’ve taken the walk. I even had the opportunity to step away and talk about something completely non-creative but inspiring in an entirely different way. I’ve done all the things I normally do to “get the juices flowing.”
And there’s nothing.
Well, almost nothing.
There’s the tiny voice.
The one that creates fear and chaos instead of ideas. The voice I was so sure I had quieted a few years ago starts whispering little negative sentiments:
Maybe you don’t have another good idea.
Maybe that part of you is gone.
Maybe you’re just not good at this anymore.
Obviously, I know none of that is true. I created something I was proud of last week.
Today just looks different.
Because grief isn’t linear, predictable, or particularly concerned with your deadlines. It can show up at the most inconvenient times and in some surprisingly sneaky ways. Sometimes it steals your joy. Sometimes it steals your energy.
And sometimes it apparently opens InDesign and then refuses to participate. The only way I’ve found to deal with it is through it. In yoga, we’re often told to sit with our emotions. Observe without judgment. Let them move through you. I’m not going to lie: I eventually had to research what that actually meant because I had no idea how to put it into practice.
When a person—and I am the person—is angry, the last thing I want to hear is, “Let it move through you.” I am definitely not observing without judgment. I am imagining the twelve different ways I could get revenge. To be clear, I will act on exactly zero of them. But I’ve learned something important about myself in those moments: sometimes stillness can’t come first.
Movement has to.
I recently read a story about a conversation between a father and son. The son was nervous about an upcoming exam, and his father was helping him prepare. Along with the predictable advice about studying and getting enough rest, he suggested something else first:
Go move your body.
Because your body doesn’t necessarily understand the difference between the stress of taking an exam and the stress of being chased by a bear. Deal with the energy first. Then come back and focus on the task in front of you.
That stayed with me.
Because grief has energy, too.
So does anger. Fear. Sadness. Frustration.
And sometimes I think we expect ourselves to perform while our bodies are still busy carrying all of it.
I can stare at the blank page and get angry that I’m not creating, but now I’ve just layered frustration on top of grief. I can criticize myself for losing focus, but that doesn’t make the grief disappear. It just gives it another emotion to carry around.
Maybe the answer isn’t forcing myself to create.
Maybe the grief needs somewhere to go first.
And letting it go doesn’t mean I don’t love.
It doesn’t mean it didn’t matter.
It doesn’t erase the person, relationship, dream, version of myself, or future I thought I was going to have.
The energy just needs to change form.
Maybe that’s part of creativity, too.
We spend so much time thinking creativity is about producing something: the design, the words, the idea, the solution. But perhaps there are moments when the creative process is simply making enough room inside yourself for something new to eventually arrive.
So maybe I’ll sit and stare at this blank page a little longer. Not because I’m waiting for the brilliant idea to show up. Because today, the silence might be doing something else.
It’s giving the emotion somewhere to go.
And I’m beginning to notice that when I stop demanding that it leave, peace tends to follow gently behind.