August 15, 2023 • 42 mins
At the recording of this episode, it was the start of a new year but if you’re anything like me you may not be feeling as productive as you thought you would no matter what time of year it is. In this episode, I’m talking about how to enter the new year mindfully and gently and how to navigate a creative block. Let’s gather in the HER Living Room and discuss reasons you may experience creative block, how to survive creative block, and how to be gentle with yourself in the process. Please enjoy this episode from the HER Archives.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, everybody, welcome back to a new episode of Her
with Amina Brown. I took a break for the holidays,
and I hope you had to take a break too,
And welcome to twenty twenty two. I don't know if
(00:43):
you also feel a little shy or reticent if I
want to bring a spelling B word into our conversation.
Feel a little reticent this year about whatever your normal?
You know, beginning of the year rituals are many years ago.
I used to be a person that would do all
(01:03):
of the goal setting. I had different questions I'd ask
myself about the year prior, and then I had a
different set of things that I would use as my
sort of goal setting for the next year. And then hey, mom,
some shitty things happened. And when those things happened, it
(01:24):
was sort of like my ability to goal set kept
changing and changing and becoming less and less defined in
a certain way. So I went from being a super
like goal setting person to then becoming a person that
did vision boards right. And I had read an article
(01:45):
by Martha Beck several years ago where she talked about
intuitive vision boards. Because I started out basically taking my
goal setting that I was doing like in my journal
or whatever and bringing that over into vision boarding, which
basically meant I was looking through magazines for very specific
picture of things and lines and words and different things
to sort of make a visual representation of what I
(02:07):
would have written down as my goals. Right, Okay, Well,
then some other you know, shitty things happen, and which
you know, sometimes after those things happen, you do have
a period where you can have like a little moment
of a laugh, like whooh, that was actually really terrible.
And I made it through that, but I think I
ended up having some really hard things happen that were
connected very much to the things I put on my
(02:30):
literal vision board. And then after that year, I remember
a very particular year that it was painful to look
back at my vision board because of how some things
had happened that year. So then I decided after reading
Martha Beck's article about intuitive vision boarding, which would basically
(02:51):
be like, you look through magazines or whatever you're using
as your fodder for what's going to become your vision board,
And she would say, you know, look through the magazine
and just pick out the words or images that you
feel drawn to. And so far that has been my
favorite way of vision boarding when I did that. However,
(03:11):
when we came into twenty twenty, and I think by
the time I got to twenty twenty, you can tell
that some harder things happened in life, right, because then
I went from intuitive vision boarding to just picking like
one word for the year. And I don't remember what
my word was for twenty nineteen, but my word for
twenty twenty was surprise. And I'm telling y'all, twenty twenty
(03:37):
surprised all of us in some ways that we did
not want to be surprised. So going into twenty twenty one,
I really don't remember if I did any sort of
like goal setting rituals. I don't remember if I did that.
I know I didn't do a vision board, and I
don't know that I had a word because I normally
remember the words. So I feel like twenty twenty one
(03:58):
it was just like, well, I'm here, so I don't
know what my twenty twenty two energy is yet. I'm
still figuring that out. Maybe you are too. But I
had an episode idea that came to me. I believe
it was it was either twenty twenty one or in
twenty twenty, and I wanted to talk to you all
about how to survive a creative block. But y'all, I
(04:19):
was so emotional about it, and my assistant and I
we meet and we talk over a lot of these episodes,
and my husband's my producer, so we talk over a
lot of the episodes. And this was one episode idea
that every time I would approach the time that I
said I was going to do it, I would get
so teary that I just knew it wasn't time. It
(04:40):
wasn't time, It wasn't time.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
I was.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
I was thinking about what's going to be the episode
to open up this year for our living room. This
episode idea came back to me, and for the first time,
I didn't feel like totally ugly crying when I thought
about it, and so I thought, well, maybe this episode
is ready now. So I thought, as we are beginning
the year, and shout out to my recovering perfectionist out there,
(05:04):
trying your very best not to give yourself ten thousand
things to do in a year that only has fifty
two weeks, right, I want to talk about what do
we do when we find ourselves in a creative block.
And many of you are probably familiar with the term
writer's block, right, So I want you to know I'm
taking writer's block and broadening it so that it also
(05:24):
applies to you, whether you are a writer or not.
It could apply to whatever creative work you may find
yourself doing. But creative block is very real, and I
have been in one for a very long time. I
have been in one more than once in my life.
I'm sure I will experience it again, and so I
thought I wanted to give you a few tips on
(05:45):
how to possibly navigate that. So I want to talk
about some caveats first. Because it is the beginning of
the year. This can be a time that we take
our goals and our things that we're trying to achieve
for the year, and I venture to say a lot
of the time we are potentially setting ourselves up for
(06:06):
the fall by having too many things to accomplish, or
having things to accomplish that we've given ourselves not enough
time to actually have an opportunity to do. So I
want you to know that that will not be the
spirit of this episode. The spirit of this episode is
to come up with some ways that can be helpful
(06:28):
to you without you feeling like you have been beat
upon emotionally. A couple of caveats I want to give you.
Caveat Number one is we're still in a pandemic, and
I want to give a shout out to my friend
Lee because there are a lot of times that I
talk with her, because she knows that I'm a recovering perfectionist.
There are a lot of times I talk with her
that she has to literally say that sentence to me,
(06:49):
and we are also in the middle of a pandemic,
so she'll say to me, whatever you did do or
did get accomplished is good and is worthy of celebration,
no matter what you had in your mind that you
thought you could complete or finish. Because being in a pandemic,
whether we talk about it a lot, whether we return
(07:11):
back to normal in certain ways, it still affects us.
It affects our ability to complete certain tasks, it affects
our rhythm of life. It affects us in a lot
of ways that we may stop talking about because it's
been going on so long and we're just trying to
find ways to sort of move past it or whatever.
But I do want to give us a reminder here
(07:33):
that it is January of twenty twenty two, and we
are still in a pandemic almost two years now. So
that is my one caveat that when we're talking about
what we do about creative block, one of the first
things we're going to do is give grace to ourselves
and acknowledge the external circumstances that may be at play
(07:54):
right that may also affect our internal creative processes. And
my other caveat is I really want this episode and
our time in the living room today to be about
how we can enter the new year gently. This is
a rhythm that has not been natural to me. It's
not something that I would have done ten years ago
(08:15):
or five years ago. But the last two or three
years of my life have taught me more about what
it means to have a gentle rhythm. And so I
have chosen to come into twenty twenty two gently. And
what does that mean. I mean, as we talk about
these things, inevitably we're going to get into conversations about
(08:35):
productivity and all this stuff. As we delve into that,
I want you to think about how you can be
gentle with yourself as the new year is starting. This
is not a time for you to beat yourself up
about the things that you didn't get done last year
and now you need to like dump those things on
yourself now at the beginning of the year. This is
not a time to speak negatively about the body that
(08:58):
you are in and all of of whatever other as
sundry goals you may feel like you need to have
because you are underneath it all being mean to the
body that you have. Right, this is a time to
be gentle with ourselves physically, emotionally, creatively in all the
ways we can. So I want you to think about
(09:19):
that as we're talking about creative block and our creative processes.
How can you enter the new year gently? I know
we have a lot of ideas about hit the ground
running and you know, gonna kill these goals and murder them.
I don't know why we have to be like so
violent to our goals, but anyways, you know, just what
(09:40):
are some ways you can take a walk into the
life that you want for yourself?
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Right?
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Okay? So how did this idea come to me to
want to talk to you about this on an episode?
So this started out with a tweet and I tweeted
a while ago. How do you return to the love
of writing and I don't tweet very often, but I
was just very curious about this, and I was curious
to hear about it from other writers. And I got
(10:09):
a mixed bag, you know, of responses, as would be
expected on Twitter. So some people had a lot of
you know, really wonderful, you know, tips to give different
things that they do to sort of keep themselves inspired,
and of course, inevitably, you know, there were some answers
in the thread and from people that quote tweeted the
thread with their responses, there were some answers in the
(10:31):
thread that started giving me like some sort of visceral
like I couldn't tell what my deal was, you know.
I was like, I don't know if I'm like, I
feel like I'm kind of angry a little bit, and
then I kind of feel like I could cry. And
so then I got off Twitter and started to process
this with my husband and of course started to ball
(10:53):
my eyes out, just cry, cry, cry, because I think
a lot emotionally for me was underneath that question. And
of course, as we know about social media, people on
social media are most of the time not thinking about
what could be bringing you to ask about these things,
or you know, they're not thinking about how they could
be tender with you or be mindful of you. You know,
(11:15):
they're just like taking what you've asked at face value
and answering based on their own perspectives. Right, And I realized,
first of all, the part that was starting to make
me feel enraged, the pandemic has also brought me that
more of a sense of rage. But the part that
was making me feel enraged was I felt rooted in
some misconceptions about writing about creative work and creative works
(11:39):
relationship to the term discipline. Right. So there were some
people that were like, well, sometimes you just need to
take a break from writing. I go on a walk,
you know, I go talk with someone I love, you know,
I do these things. And then it was like the
other half of the thread or the timeline was like,
you don't need to be really getting into all this
like emotional stuff, Like you just need to go write.
(12:02):
You just need to go like do that. And I
want to tell y all a side story without name dropping.
I don't want nobody really trying to like get involved
with what I say about them on this podcast, So
I'll just tell you a very well known New York
Times bestselling white male author I was at a conference
with him many years ago, and he said to me, now,
(12:23):
I will admit to you that I had like an
author crush on him at the time. I loved his books,
and I'm sure some of you may know who it is,
but I'm not telling you unless you have my actual
cell phone number. Anyways, so I loved his books, and
there was just a lot about what he wrote that
I really loved and felt represented some things about our generation.
(12:47):
And I don't know, he was like a big deal
to me at the time, was a big deal to
a lot of folks at the time. And I had
this opportunity to be in a green room with him
at a conference, and I thought, well, i'm here with him,
I should ask him some writing advice. And so I
asked him whatever my quintessential writing question was, and he said, well,
you need to treat writing the same way that a
(13:09):
plumber treats his work. Like he was like, if a plumber,
you know, gets a job, they just go there and
do the plumbing every day. It's not an emotional act
for them. They just go and they work on the pipes,
they do whatever's required for the job, and they leave.
He was like, you'll be more successful approaching writing like that.
(13:29):
And for many years, y'all, I tried to follow his advice,
and now I think that that is very bad advice,
or I guess I should say, I don't think that
advice is for everybody. Maybe for some people that works,
but I am a person whose creative work is very
much attached to my emotions and feelings. And to the
extent that I start detaching my emotions and feelings from
(13:49):
my creative work, then it's not going to feel like me,
and it's not going to feel true, and it's not
going to feel authentic. Right. And he was also a
writer that was one of those people that recommends that
you go to a cabin and write, and that is
always really laughable for me because I'm like, who in
their regular life has, in addition to their house a cabin,
(14:14):
Like where am I going in Vermont? What am I doing?
Where's that happening?
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Right?
Speaker 1 (14:18):
So, I think there are a lot of misconceptions to
me about how creative work works. And I think there
can be this tendency to sort of speak to or
speak about people who do creative work as if they
are inherently lazy and as if all they do is procrastinate,
Now listen, Okay, okay, let's just start with the fact
(14:42):
that I know creative people do procrastinate. Some of us
might be lazy, right, But I do think that might
be oversimplifying the situation, you know, And I think that's
not helping us care for our souls in the creative process,
because for many of us, our souls are very attached
(15:04):
to that, and it's our souls that help us make
that help us create things. So when we talk about
the misconceptions between writing and discipline, I think the go
to answer whenever a creative person is like, I'm having
writer's block, I'm having a hard time getting my ideas out.
What should I do? It's like the go to answer
as always, Well, you should do more, you should get
(15:25):
up earlier, you should spend more hours, you should do
all this long list of things. You should go to
the mythical cabin. You know, you should go to bed
at ten and like wake up at one thirty am
and like write during that time. You know, there are
always these very wild and a lot of times, for
a lot of people, unsustainable ideas about how writing or
(15:49):
creative work actually work. And I want to submit to
you that I don't believe the answer to most problems
that creative people have is that you're not doing enough.
Because a lot of us that do creative work have
some sense of a belief inside that we are not
enough or that we are always not doing enough, some
(16:11):
of us, right, And so for a lot of us
who have those feelings already, we take in a lot
of those ideas that I would consider to be sort
of toxic productivity. Right, that our worth or our worthiness
as a person is in how much should we get
done and how quickly we do it and how early
(16:31):
we woke up. And I think when you get too
caught in that, you might be losing the soul of
the process. And if you're listening to this and you're like,
that is my process, that's what gives me life, then
that's what your process should be. I think the thing
is creative process is different for each person. It can
be different for the same person in different seasons of life.
(16:55):
So we should have that sort of flexibility for how
we approach to what we're doing and what we do
when we're having a hard time doing the thing that
we love. So I want to talk about first of
all reasons that you may experience creative block, and I'm
really digging under here beyond the reasons that I said earlier.
(17:16):
Right that people are like, oh, you're just not putting
in enough time, You're not doing enough, is basically the answer.
I want to dig underneath there, beyond those things. And
the first thing, not that I am trying to bring
sadness into the chat, but we do have to talk
about it is grief, and grief is it's a mini
(17:37):
layered experience in our lives because there are a lot
of things that can bring grief into our worlds. Right,
It could be the loss of someone, It could be
the loss of a relationship, It could be the loss
of an opportunity. It can come up and pop up
in so many different ways, and unresolved grief has been
(18:02):
my creative block a lot of the time. And the
thing is, if you're experiencing grief at this moment in
your life, the reasoning that you need a cabin, that
you need to be doing more, that you need to
get up earlier, that you need to push yourself and
put in more hours, none of that makes sense to
(18:25):
the brain and soul and body. That is experiencing grief.
Grief will certainly become a creative block. I wish I
could remember the thread or that I kept track of it,
But there was a writer around the time that I
had submitted my question, and I don't even think it
was someone that I follow. I think it just showed
up on my Twitter timeline because some other people that
(18:47):
I follow had liked some posts on the thread. But
someone who was a writer had posted that they had
experienced a loss of a loved one, and they asked
people on Twitter that were writers after or loss, how
long did it take you to return to writing? And
I went through the thread because I've experienced a lot
of grief myself, some related to losing people that I loved,
(19:12):
but some related to other just personal hard things that
happened in life, right, And reading through the thread was
actually comforting to me in a way because there were
a lot of people on there like, oh, it took
me a year. It took me a year and a half,
you know, to return to writing after you know, losing
a parent or losing a partner, right. And I think
(19:33):
it's interesting because when we are succumbing to the ideas
of toxic productivity, we are being made to think that
we should be getting over things pretty quickly, that we
should be returning back to air quotes normal, right, And
there are some things that we're going to experience or
go through that will make us different, and we should
not expect ourselves to return immediately back to that normal.
(20:07):
Another thing that I wanted to tell y'all could be
a reason why you may experience a creative block, which
still I feel like all these things I'm about to
say have grief connected to them, really, But the second
thing I wanted to say is grappling with the fear
of failure, the fear of success, or grappling with an
experience of failure or an experience of success, which feels
(20:31):
very wild, but it's true. You can experience creative block
because you did a creative project or worked on something
creative and it didn't do well. And however that's defined.
Maybe it didn't numerically do well. Maybe at your job,
it didn't receive the support that you thought it was
going to receive, or you know, whatever, those things are, right,
(20:55):
it didn't happen the way we wanted it to. It
wasn't celebrated the way we hoped it was going to
be experiencing. That can also cause creative block, because then
you feel afraid as to if I have done my
first art show, just as an example, y'all know I
don't do visual art, but I'm just using this as
an example. If I've done my first visual art show
(21:18):
and none of the pieces sell and the reception wasn't
that great and there weren't a lot of people who
showed up to it, then my confidence in my work
and in myself approaching my second time doing a showing
will be low, and it will be hard sometimes for
us as creative folks to conjure that up. And then
(21:40):
sometimes it's really hard for us to dig into what
did we feel disappointed about when we put out the
thing and it didn't do what we thought it was
going to do. But if we're going to be able
to move forward from having a creative block, we cannot
leave these emotions. Then feel feel and experiences unprocessed. Right,
(22:03):
You could also be grappling with success. This has happened
to me with a few of my poems where I
wrote a poem and it started doing really well. I
was doing that poem in front of different stages. You know,
earlier on in my career, recording this poem with different
artists and just seeing people respond to it, you know,
(22:24):
and then when it came time for that season to
change and it was a season of writing, I had
to get past those feelings of what if I never
write a poem like that one again? And what if
all the other poems I writ are like not as
good as that? And we know that staying in that
type of thought will totally keep you from being able
to create, because now you are comparing yourself to your
(22:47):
past self versus being able to come back to whatever
your version of the blank page is with curiosity, with
this openness to see what will the you of today
want to make versus what the you yesterday or two
years ago or whatever made. Also, I do want to
talk about going through trauma or going through something that's
(23:09):
so hard that you have entered into a survival mode.
And I think this is really important also because for
some of us, you know, I know some people in
my life that are caretakers of someone who is sick
or is not well, and in order for them to
take care of that person, they have to be in
a survival mode, you know, I know some people that have,
(23:31):
you know, chronic diagnoses that they've received, or have diagnoses
that they've received that are going to involve a lot
of difficult treatment, a lot of difficult meds.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Right.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
That puts you in a place where you enter a
survival mode, which means now so many other things start
to feel like a luxury. Right, Like, when you're in
survival mode, you're just doing everything you can to make
it through the day, to make it through the week,
to make it to the end of the month. And
when you're in survival mode, yeah, it can be very
(24:02):
hard to be creative during that time. And again, that's
another time in your life that somebody telling you to
go away to a cabin when you may be broke
and you may not be able to afford to take
some trip somewhere else so that you can have a break.
You may literally be going through a time in your
life that you're not gonna have that break and you're
not gonna have another place that you can go to.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Right.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
So, I think it's important to speak to that because
whenever we give sort of and when I say we,
I mean the people who have podcasts have social media platforms.
Whenever we air quotes give advice to people and we're like, oh,
you just need to It's really never that simple, right.
And the last reason, which seems simple but I do
(24:49):
think is a factor, is just pure exhaustion, not really
having had time that you've rested, whether that means sleep
or whether that means just this time that you weren't
having to pull on the part of yourself that your
creativity would be coming from. Right, these are reasons you
(25:09):
may be experiencing creative block. Okay, so what do you
do when you experience creative block? And one of the
things that I want to say to you that I
think is so important is that you should remember that
when you experience creative block, never forget that your healing
is more important than your output. And the truth is,
(25:32):
especially for those of us who also work in creative world,
your clients are not necessarily going to say that to you.
The team that you work with may not necessarily say
that to you. Your boss may not say that to you,
But it is true your healing is more important than
your output because at the end of the day, you
(25:52):
only have one you, and you have to take care
of yourself. The amount of albums you put out out
the amount of paragraphs or stanzas that you write, the
amount of design that you can say you completed, the
amount of photography that you can say you've done. All
those things are not more important than your health all around.
(26:17):
And we can think of examples ad nauseum of people
whose art we love right but we lost them sooner
than we wanted to because their output, unfortunately became more
important to the people around them than their health or
their healing. So that's my first thing what to do
(26:39):
when you experienced creative block, Remember that and think about
are there things in your life right now that are wounded?
Do you have these areas of life where you have
all this unprocessed grief, unprocessed disappointment, unprocessed time that you've
been in a survival And I want to say, I
(27:01):
feel like I'm always like a both and so here's
my both. And I want to say, on the one hand,
sometimes you need to heal before you can create, And
I think this is different for every person, So you
have to find which one of these people is you.
But a lot of times for me, I'm not a
cathartic creator. I'm not someone that when I'm going through
stuff it's my writing that I pour that into, or
(27:23):
it's you know, other art that I pour that into.
For me, I don't actually emotionally multitask very well. So
for me sometimes I have to take some time to
heal and then return to the creative process. And it
can also be true that there are some people that
it is creating that is a part of your healing process.
(27:43):
It is being creative that is a part of the
way that you begin to process grief, or process trauma,
or process things that have been disappointing to you or
hurtful to you, or even sometimes process things that have
been really amazing and you just don't even know how
you process that at the moment. That can also be true.
(28:05):
I think you also have to release yourself from toxic productivity.
I think we could all, for twenty twenty two stand
to do more of this. And you know, is toxic
productivity connected to a lot of things. Yes, it is
connected to capitalism. It is definitely connected to white supremacy.
It is baked in a lot of our those of
(28:25):
us that live in the States here, It's baked in
a lot of our American way of being. It can
be baked into a very Western way of being, but
we need to release ourselves from that and find ways
to do that. I'm going to talk about that a
little more later. Another tip I'll give you of what
to do when you experience creative block is to take
in the creativity of other people. This isn't always to
(28:47):
take in their creativity so that you can be like, oh,
let me take that and just make this thing they made.
That's not what I mean when I say that, But
I mean it can be helpful to take in the
wonderful and beautiful and fascinating and provocative things that other
creative people have made. And I'll tell you what it
does for me. Because sometimes, of course, our ego is
(29:08):
connected to our creative process, right. We bring our ego
into the room in some ways, and some of us
have to do that, right, some of the art we make,
like we have to have some ego, We have to
have some confidence about it, or why would we do
what we're doing if we didn't have a little bit
of that. But I think there are times that we
end up putting too much pressure on ourselves, as if
(29:30):
the whole world is going to crumble if we don't
know fill in the blank. With whatever your art is.
So for me, the whole world's going to crumble if
I don't finish this poem. The whole world is going
to crumble. If I don't come up with an amazing
podcast idea. The whole world is going to fall apart
if I don't paint this the exact right way, if
I don't design this the exact right way, if I
(29:50):
don't make this film the exact right way right. And
I think that's putting too much pressure on ourselves. And
I will tell you one thing that I've started doing
adding to my routine as I started taking very small
steps back into my writing process is I've started adding
just a few minutes of reading to that time. And
(30:12):
I have other times that I read, but I have
very specific books that I like to read before I'm
about to write, and I just had to start out really,
really small. So I think I started out where of
those books I would put my timer on and maybe
read for five minutes or ten minutes, typically no longer
than ten minutes. And one of the books I'm reading
right now during my writing time is I'm reading Black
(30:34):
Women Writers by Claudia Tate. I don't even know if
this book is still in print because I found it
at a thrift store. Book Boy, is it wonderful because
Claudia Tate is interviewing a lot of amazing Black women writers,
and I think the book came out either in the
late seventies or early eighties, so you're seeing these interviews
with Maya Angelo and Ugh, I mean, so many amazing
(30:54):
Black women writers in this book. And even reading that
book for ten minutes, it did a thing to me
that I didn't think it was going to do. It
actually calmed me down and helped me to take less
pressure off of what happens when I write. Because reading
about these black women and thinking to myself, you know,
in my family, in my bloodline, I am a part
(31:14):
of a long line of women that have had a
wonderful and amazing and difficult and complicated lives, right and
there are so many strides that they made in their
own lives that have paved the way for me. So
in certain ways, that is a part of what gives
me the confidence to do what I'm doing that I
(31:35):
know these women paved the way for me. I hope
that in my lifetime I'm paving the way for the
other folks to come after me, but creatively, I think
that can be helpful too. There was something about me
reading the words of these black women that they were
actually writing, some of them around the time that I
was born, and thinking to myself, like, these are geniuses.
(31:56):
These are black women who are just brilliant and their
work had such an impact on the world, you know,
And that means my charge is to come to the
page or to the creative process and be myself because
these women have come before me. I need to come
(32:17):
to the page the same way that they came to
the page as they are, as who they are, with
their ideas and I don't know, y'all. Something about that
just helped me to relax a bit and take the
pressure off of myself that it's not that the world's
going to crumble if I don't write this poem. It's
that I want to write this poem because it's important
(32:38):
to me to say, or because I have something funny
to say, or because I hope me writing this will
bring somebody else to laugh about the absurdity of life,
or whatever is bringing me to that writing process, right,
So take in the creativity of other people because it
can remind you that as a creative you are a
part of a community of people making things. It is
(33:00):
not all on your shoulders to make all the things.
It's on your shoulders to be exactly who you are
to make what you have in your hands, in your
mind and your soul to make. And the last thing
I would say what to do when you experienced creative block,
just start small and try. You might even cry the
(33:20):
first time you come back to it. You might not
write anything, or create anything, or draw anything that you
think is worth anything at all, But just start small
and try. Those of us who are writers talk about
the idea of and I'm not sure whose quote this is,
(33:41):
but this idea of sort of writing with the door closed,
and then you edit with the door open, to mean
that you have a certain part of your process as
a writer that it's just you and the page there.
And then you get to a point where you can
open up what you've made to an editor or to
other people to get perspective, to get feedback or whatever.
(34:03):
And I think sometimes we can get to a point where,
especially between social media and all these other things, that
there's so much of what we create that immediately is
out there to the public that then it can feel
challenging to sort of close that door again and go
back to where it's just you and your voice and
your stories and your creativity and your ideas in the room.
(34:26):
But go back and start small. Even if you just
can only do five minutes of sketching, or you can
only do five minutes of beginning a little bit of choreography,
or whatever the creative thing is you do, just start
small and try. And when you start small, don't let
yourself feel beholden to how what you're making will be
(34:51):
in the public, you know, or how it will be
received when it's out there. It's also okay to make
things that nobody ever sees, or to make things just
because you want to see where it goes. And I
think when we start sort of taking all of the
faceless voices and eyes out of the room with us,
then we can really return back to our true process.
(35:15):
I want to speak quickly before I end the episode
about what to do about creative block when creative work
is your livelihood. I want to speak to my freelancers,
my entrepreneurs, my artist entrepreneurs, my people who work for
creative agencies and you know, work for companies where you
also are doing creative work there, What do you do
(35:37):
when you're experiencing creative block? Because even though I don't
believe in said white Man author's thing about the plumbing,
when you do creative work for a living, you don't
always have the luxury of being able to be like, Wow,
I'm tired, and I don't want to do this right now,
because your rent, or your or car payment, or your
(36:01):
insurance or whatever bills you may have are connected to
whether or not you can conjure up this creativity right.
So here's some tips for you find one small way
this year to create something just because you want to.
For those of us who do creative work as our
livelihood or as our job or vocation, occupation, whichever way
(36:24):
you refer to it, I think we can become well
known for being able to take what other people want
to make something creative, and we can do a really
great job taking their ideas, their initiatives, or whatever it is,
and making it amazing. And then we look up and
we're so drained that we don't have the energy anymore
(36:46):
to really do something just because we want to, just
because we want to experiment with it, We want to
see how it turns out. We're not sure. We don't
know all those things, right. I want to speak a
little bit about the cycle of making things we love
and then clients loving what we made, and then ending
up getting paid for the thing that we started doing
(37:08):
because we loved it, right, and then somehow it sort
of feels can not always, but can feel a little tainted,
a little corrupted, right that you were like, oh, I
started out doing this thing just because I wanted to. Well,
now it's part of my job to do that thing.
Or now a client has seen me doing that thing
(37:29):
and they want that exact thing, and so then that
becomes a part of the business. And sometimes that also
gets disconnected from what you loved about what you were
doing in the first place, which is a really hard cycle.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
Right.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
So I want you to think about you may have
made something that then led to you getting to where
you could do this as your livelihood, which is an
amazing opportunity to have. If you get this opportunity, it's great,
it's great sometimes mostly it's great to be able to
have the opportunity to do what you love and make
(38:02):
a living at it. If that's something that you always
dreamed of doing. But it's also okay to think about
some ways to return to what you loved about that
before there were clients, before there were brands to partner with,
before all of that, Like how do you return to
the roots of what you're doing? You know? For me,
that was going to open mics and hearing other poets
(38:25):
in the city I traveled a lot. Most of my
performances were traveled for a very long time. So there
was something good for me about returning to the roots
of spoken word in Atlanta and getting to sit and
listen to other poets, getting to take my new stuff
that I was still like working the kinks out of.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
You know.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
That's one way that I go back to the roots
of what I love, you know, So think about that
for yourself. And another thing I would say for my
people that like, this is your job, job. One thing
that you can do about creative block when your creative
work is your life flihood is think about how to
institute more rhythms of rest into your work. Think about
(39:06):
how to not have your rhythm of work or your
pace of life in your job to be where your
creativity is constantly being pulled on without you having an
opportunity to pour back into yourself. So when I say rest,
yes I mean sleep as well. Yes I mean taking
vacation time when you can take it, or stay cation
(39:27):
time even if you can't afford to go somewhere, can
you afford to stay at your home, but have some
days where you're not having to constantly be pulled on
by all the people that want want, want from you.
And lastly, for everybody, whether you work in a creative
field or not, whatever your creative art is, find small
(39:49):
ways to return to what you love and why you
loved it in the first place. I want you to
think about that for a minute. Think about the creative
thing that you miss doing the most, or that you
remember loving doing the most, and think about the you
that just was starting out, you know, Like for me,
I can think about the girl that went to her
first open mic when she was like nineteen years old
(40:13):
and heard some of the most amazing poetry she'd ever
heard in her life, and also realized how bad her
poetry was all at the same time, you know, And
how I went home that night after that first open
mic feeling so charged up to write and write better
(40:34):
and perform better and having this willingness to keep showing
up even though I was gonna stumble and fumble and
mess up and forget my poem I was trying to memorize.
You know, go back to those roots for yourself in
whatever way, and find small ways to return to that.
I believe the same thing about creativity that I believe
(40:55):
about cooking. We talk about this a lot, those of
us who grew up eating soul food. That's a very
very like, very Black community central idea that when we
make soul food, what makes it delicious is yes, someone
who can technically cook right, but it's someone who puts
the love in it when they cook. And you want
(41:16):
to feel that feeling when you're being creative. You want
to be putting the love in it. And if you've
gotten to the point where you're not putting the love
in it, I hope you'll go back and think about
what's causing that block. For you is a period of
resting and not making. What you need is therapy. What
you need is time with your friends who are not
(41:37):
super concerned with whatever you do at work. They just
love you for you. Is that what you need? Whatever
you need take care of yourself. This year. Go gently
into the year, Go gently into your goals. Be kind
to your body, be kind to your past self, be
kind to who you are right now. That's the way
(42:00):
we start the new year.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
See y'all next week.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
Her with Amina Brown is produced by Matt Owen for
Sober Feedy Productions as a part of the Seneca Women
Podcast Network and partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening, and
don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast.
Hey, everybody, welcome back to a new episode of Her
with Amina Brown. I took a break for the holidays,
and I hope you had to take a break too,
And welcome to twenty twenty two. I don't know if
(00:43):
you also feel a little shy or reticent if I
want to bring a spelling B word into our conversation.
Feel a little reticent this year about whatever your normal?
You know, beginning of the year rituals are many years ago.
I used to be a person that would do all
(01:03):
of the goal setting. I had different questions I'd ask
myself about the year prior, and then I had a
different set of things that I would use as my
sort of goal setting for the next year. And then hey, mom,
some shitty things happened. And when those things happened, it
(01:24):
was sort of like my ability to goal set kept
changing and changing and becoming less and less defined in
a certain way. So I went from being a super
like goal setting person to then becoming a person that
did vision boards right. And I had read an article
(01:45):
by Martha Beck several years ago where she talked about
intuitive vision boards. Because I started out basically taking my
goal setting that I was doing like in my journal
or whatever and bringing that over into vision boarding, which
basically meant I was looking through magazines for very specific
picture of things and lines and words and different things
to sort of make a visual representation of what I
(02:07):
would have written down as my goals. Right, Okay, Well,
then some other you know, shitty things happen, and which
you know, sometimes after those things happen, you do have
a period where you can have like a little moment
of a laugh, like whooh, that was actually really terrible.
And I made it through that, but I think I
ended up having some really hard things happen that were
connected very much to the things I put on my
(02:30):
literal vision board. And then after that year, I remember
a very particular year that it was painful to look
back at my vision board because of how some things
had happened that year. So then I decided after reading
Martha Beck's article about intuitive vision boarding, which would basically
(02:51):
be like, you look through magazines or whatever you're using
as your fodder for what's going to become your vision board,
And she would say, you know, look through the magazine
and just pick out the words or images that you
feel drawn to. And so far that has been my
favorite way of vision boarding when I did that. However,
(03:11):
when we came into twenty twenty, and I think by
the time I got to twenty twenty, you can tell
that some harder things happened in life, right, because then
I went from intuitive vision boarding to just picking like
one word for the year. And I don't remember what
my word was for twenty nineteen, but my word for
twenty twenty was surprise. And I'm telling y'all, twenty twenty
(03:37):
surprised all of us in some ways that we did
not want to be surprised. So going into twenty twenty one,
I really don't remember if I did any sort of
like goal setting rituals. I don't remember if I did that.
I know I didn't do a vision board, and I
don't know that I had a word because I normally
remember the words. So I feel like twenty twenty one
(03:58):
it was just like, well, I'm here, so I don't
know what my twenty twenty two energy is yet. I'm
still figuring that out. Maybe you are too. But I
had an episode idea that came to me. I believe
it was it was either twenty twenty one or in
twenty twenty, and I wanted to talk to you all
about how to survive a creative block. But y'all, I
(04:19):
was so emotional about it, and my assistant and I
we meet and we talk over a lot of these episodes,
and my husband's my producer, so we talk over a
lot of the episodes. And this was one episode idea
that every time I would approach the time that I
said I was going to do it, I would get
so teary that I just knew it wasn't time. It
(04:40):
wasn't time, It wasn't time.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
I was.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
I was thinking about what's going to be the episode
to open up this year for our living room. This
episode idea came back to me, and for the first time,
I didn't feel like totally ugly crying when I thought
about it, and so I thought, well, maybe this episode
is ready now. So I thought, as we are beginning
the year, and shout out to my recovering perfectionist out there,
(05:04):
trying your very best not to give yourself ten thousand
things to do in a year that only has fifty
two weeks, right, I want to talk about what do
we do when we find ourselves in a creative block.
And many of you are probably familiar with the term
writer's block, right, So I want you to know I'm
taking writer's block and broadening it so that it also
(05:24):
applies to you, whether you are a writer or not.
It could apply to whatever creative work you may find
yourself doing. But creative block is very real, and I
have been in one for a very long time. I
have been in one more than once in my life.
I'm sure I will experience it again, and so I
thought I wanted to give you a few tips on
(05:45):
how to possibly navigate that. So I want to talk
about some caveats first. Because it is the beginning of
the year. This can be a time that we take
our goals and our things that we're trying to achieve
for the year, and I venture to say a lot
of the time we are potentially setting ourselves up for
(06:06):
the fall by having too many things to accomplish, or
having things to accomplish that we've given ourselves not enough
time to actually have an opportunity to do. So I
want you to know that that will not be the
spirit of this episode. The spirit of this episode is
to come up with some ways that can be helpful
(06:28):
to you without you feeling like you have been beat
upon emotionally. A couple of caveats I want to give you.
Caveat Number one is we're still in a pandemic, and
I want to give a shout out to my friend
Lee because there are a lot of times that I
talk with her, because she knows that I'm a recovering perfectionist.
There are a lot of times I talk with her
that she has to literally say that sentence to me,
(06:49):
and we are also in the middle of a pandemic,
so she'll say to me, whatever you did do or
did get accomplished is good and is worthy of celebration,
no matter what you had in your mind that you
thought you could complete or finish. Because being in a pandemic,
whether we talk about it a lot, whether we return
(07:11):
back to normal in certain ways, it still affects us.
It affects our ability to complete certain tasks, it affects
our rhythm of life. It affects us in a lot
of ways that we may stop talking about because it's
been going on so long and we're just trying to
find ways to sort of move past it or whatever.
But I do want to give us a reminder here
(07:33):
that it is January of twenty twenty two, and we
are still in a pandemic almost two years now. So
that is my one caveat that when we're talking about
what we do about creative block, one of the first
things we're going to do is give grace to ourselves
and acknowledge the external circumstances that may be at play
(07:54):
right that may also affect our internal creative processes. And
my other caveat is I really want this episode and
our time in the living room today to be about
how we can enter the new year gently. This is
a rhythm that has not been natural to me. It's
not something that I would have done ten years ago
(08:15):
or five years ago. But the last two or three
years of my life have taught me more about what
it means to have a gentle rhythm. And so I
have chosen to come into twenty twenty two gently. And
what does that mean. I mean, as we talk about
these things, inevitably we're going to get into conversations about
(08:35):
productivity and all this stuff. As we delve into that,
I want you to think about how you can be
gentle with yourself as the new year is starting. This
is not a time for you to beat yourself up
about the things that you didn't get done last year
and now you need to like dump those things on
yourself now at the beginning of the year. This is
not a time to speak negatively about the body that
(08:58):
you are in and all of of whatever other as
sundry goals you may feel like you need to have
because you are underneath it all being mean to the
body that you have. Right, this is a time to
be gentle with ourselves physically, emotionally, creatively in all the
ways we can. So I want you to think about
(09:19):
that as we're talking about creative block and our creative processes.
How can you enter the new year gently? I know
we have a lot of ideas about hit the ground
running and you know, gonna kill these goals and murder them.
I don't know why we have to be like so
violent to our goals, but anyways, you know, just what
(09:40):
are some ways you can take a walk into the
life that you want for yourself?
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Right?
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Okay? So how did this idea come to me to
want to talk to you about this on an episode?
So this started out with a tweet and I tweeted
a while ago. How do you return to the love
of writing and I don't tweet very often, but I
was just very curious about this, and I was curious
to hear about it from other writers. And I got
(10:09):
a mixed bag, you know, of responses, as would be
expected on Twitter. So some people had a lot of
you know, really wonderful, you know, tips to give different
things that they do to sort of keep themselves inspired,
and of course, inevitably, you know, there were some answers
in the thread and from people that quote tweeted the
thread with their responses, there were some answers in the
(10:31):
thread that started giving me like some sort of visceral
like I couldn't tell what my deal was, you know.
I was like, I don't know if I'm like, I
feel like I'm kind of angry a little bit, and
then I kind of feel like I could cry. And
so then I got off Twitter and started to process
this with my husband and of course started to ball
(10:53):
my eyes out, just cry, cry, cry, because I think
a lot emotionally for me was underneath that question. And
of course, as we know about social media, people on
social media are most of the time not thinking about
what could be bringing you to ask about these things,
or you know, they're not thinking about how they could
be tender with you or be mindful of you. You know,
(11:15):
they're just like taking what you've asked at face value
and answering based on their own perspectives. Right, And I realized,
first of all, the part that was starting to make
me feel enraged, the pandemic has also brought me that
more of a sense of rage. But the part that
was making me feel enraged was I felt rooted in
some misconceptions about writing about creative work and creative works
(11:39):
relationship to the term discipline. Right. So there were some
people that were like, well, sometimes you just need to
take a break from writing. I go on a walk,
you know, I go talk with someone I love, you know,
I do these things. And then it was like the
other half of the thread or the timeline was like,
you don't need to be really getting into all this
like emotional stuff, Like you just need to go write.
(12:02):
You just need to go like do that. And I
want to tell y all a side story without name dropping.
I don't want nobody really trying to like get involved
with what I say about them on this podcast, So
I'll just tell you a very well known New York
Times bestselling white male author I was at a conference
with him many years ago, and he said to me, now,
(12:23):
I will admit to you that I had like an
author crush on him at the time. I loved his books,
and I'm sure some of you may know who it is,
but I'm not telling you unless you have my actual
cell phone number. Anyways, so I loved his books, and
there was just a lot about what he wrote that
I really loved and felt represented some things about our generation.
(12:47):
And I don't know, he was like a big deal
to me at the time, was a big deal to
a lot of folks at the time. And I had
this opportunity to be in a green room with him
at a conference, and I thought, well, i'm here with him,
I should ask him some writing advice. And so I
asked him whatever my quintessential writing question was, and he said, well,
you need to treat writing the same way that a
(13:09):
plumber treats his work. Like he was like, if a plumber,
you know, gets a job, they just go there and
do the plumbing every day. It's not an emotional act
for them. They just go and they work on the pipes,
they do whatever's required for the job, and they leave.
He was like, you'll be more successful approaching writing like that.
(13:29):
And for many years, y'all, I tried to follow his advice,
and now I think that that is very bad advice,
or I guess I should say, I don't think that
advice is for everybody. Maybe for some people that works,
but I am a person whose creative work is very
much attached to my emotions and feelings. And to the
extent that I start detaching my emotions and feelings from
(13:49):
my creative work, then it's not going to feel like me,
and it's not going to feel true, and it's not
going to feel authentic. Right. And he was also a
writer that was one of those people that recommends that
you go to a cabin and write, and that is
always really laughable for me because I'm like, who in
their regular life has, in addition to their house a cabin,
(14:14):
Like where am I going in Vermont? What am I doing?
Where's that happening?
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Right?
Speaker 1 (14:18):
So, I think there are a lot of misconceptions to
me about how creative work works. And I think there
can be this tendency to sort of speak to or
speak about people who do creative work as if they
are inherently lazy and as if all they do is procrastinate,
Now listen, Okay, okay, let's just start with the fact
(14:42):
that I know creative people do procrastinate. Some of us
might be lazy, right, But I do think that might
be oversimplifying the situation, you know, And I think that's
not helping us care for our souls in the creative process,
because for many of us, our souls are very attached
(15:04):
to that, and it's our souls that help us make
that help us create things. So when we talk about
the misconceptions between writing and discipline, I think the go
to answer whenever a creative person is like, I'm having
writer's block, I'm having a hard time getting my ideas out.
What should I do? It's like the go to answer
as always, Well, you should do more, you should get
(15:25):
up earlier, you should spend more hours, you should do
all this long list of things. You should go to
the mythical cabin. You know, you should go to bed
at ten and like wake up at one thirty am
and like write during that time. You know, there are
always these very wild and a lot of times, for
a lot of people, unsustainable ideas about how writing or
(15:49):
creative work actually work. And I want to submit to
you that I don't believe the answer to most problems
that creative people have is that you're not doing enough.
Because a lot of us that do creative work have
some sense of a belief inside that we are not
enough or that we are always not doing enough, some
(16:11):
of us, right, And so for a lot of us
who have those feelings already, we take in a lot
of those ideas that I would consider to be sort
of toxic productivity. Right, that our worth or our worthiness
as a person is in how much should we get
done and how quickly we do it and how early
(16:31):
we woke up. And I think when you get too
caught in that, you might be losing the soul of
the process. And if you're listening to this and you're like,
that is my process, that's what gives me life, then
that's what your process should be. I think the thing
is creative process is different for each person. It can
be different for the same person in different seasons of life.
(16:55):
So we should have that sort of flexibility for how
we approach to what we're doing and what we do
when we're having a hard time doing the thing that
we love. So I want to talk about first of
all reasons that you may experience creative block, and I'm
really digging under here beyond the reasons that I said earlier.
(17:16):
Right that people are like, oh, you're just not putting
in enough time, You're not doing enough, is basically the answer.
I want to dig underneath there, beyond those things. And
the first thing, not that I am trying to bring
sadness into the chat, but we do have to talk
about it is grief, and grief is it's a mini
(17:37):
layered experience in our lives because there are a lot
of things that can bring grief into our worlds. Right,
It could be the loss of someone, It could be
the loss of a relationship, It could be the loss
of an opportunity. It can come up and pop up
in so many different ways, and unresolved grief has been
(18:02):
my creative block a lot of the time. And the
thing is, if you're experiencing grief at this moment in
your life, the reasoning that you need a cabin, that
you need to be doing more, that you need to
get up earlier, that you need to push yourself and
put in more hours, none of that makes sense to
(18:25):
the brain and soul and body. That is experiencing grief.
Grief will certainly become a creative block. I wish I
could remember the thread or that I kept track of it,
But there was a writer around the time that I
had submitted my question, and I don't even think it
was someone that I follow. I think it just showed
up on my Twitter timeline because some other people that
(18:47):
I follow had liked some posts on the thread. But
someone who was a writer had posted that they had
experienced a loss of a loved one, and they asked
people on Twitter that were writers after or loss, how
long did it take you to return to writing? And
I went through the thread because I've experienced a lot
of grief myself, some related to losing people that I loved,
(19:12):
but some related to other just personal hard things that
happened in life, right, And reading through the thread was
actually comforting to me in a way because there were
a lot of people on there like, oh, it took
me a year. It took me a year and a half,
you know, to return to writing after you know, losing
a parent or losing a partner, right. And I think
(19:33):
it's interesting because when we are succumbing to the ideas
of toxic productivity, we are being made to think that
we should be getting over things pretty quickly, that we
should be returning back to air quotes normal, right, And
there are some things that we're going to experience or
go through that will make us different, and we should
not expect ourselves to return immediately back to that normal.
(20:07):
Another thing that I wanted to tell y'all could be
a reason why you may experience a creative block, which
still I feel like all these things I'm about to
say have grief connected to them, really, But the second
thing I wanted to say is grappling with the fear
of failure, the fear of success, or grappling with an
experience of failure or an experience of success, which feels
(20:31):
very wild, but it's true. You can experience creative block
because you did a creative project or worked on something
creative and it didn't do well. And however that's defined.
Maybe it didn't numerically do well. Maybe at your job,
it didn't receive the support that you thought it was
going to receive, or you know, whatever, those things are, right,
(20:55):
it didn't happen the way we wanted it to. It
wasn't celebrated the way we hoped it was going to
be experiencing. That can also cause creative block, because then
you feel afraid as to if I have done my
first art show, just as an example, y'all know I
don't do visual art, but I'm just using this as
an example. If I've done my first visual art show
(21:18):
and none of the pieces sell and the reception wasn't
that great and there weren't a lot of people who
showed up to it, then my confidence in my work
and in myself approaching my second time doing a showing
will be low, and it will be hard sometimes for
us as creative folks to conjure that up. And then
(21:40):
sometimes it's really hard for us to dig into what
did we feel disappointed about when we put out the
thing and it didn't do what we thought it was
going to do. But if we're going to be able
to move forward from having a creative block, we cannot
leave these emotions. Then feel feel and experiences unprocessed. Right,
(22:03):
You could also be grappling with success. This has happened
to me with a few of my poems where I
wrote a poem and it started doing really well. I
was doing that poem in front of different stages. You know,
earlier on in my career, recording this poem with different
artists and just seeing people respond to it, you know,
(22:24):
and then when it came time for that season to
change and it was a season of writing, I had
to get past those feelings of what if I never
write a poem like that one again? And what if
all the other poems I writ are like not as
good as that? And we know that staying in that
type of thought will totally keep you from being able
to create, because now you are comparing yourself to your
(22:47):
past self versus being able to come back to whatever
your version of the blank page is with curiosity, with
this openness to see what will the you of today
want to make versus what the you yesterday or two
years ago or whatever made. Also, I do want to
talk about going through trauma or going through something that's
(23:09):
so hard that you have entered into a survival mode.
And I think this is really important also because for
some of us, you know, I know some people in
my life that are caretakers of someone who is sick
or is not well, and in order for them to
take care of that person, they have to be in
a survival mode, you know, I know some people that have,
(23:31):
you know, chronic diagnoses that they've received, or have diagnoses
that they've received that are going to involve a lot
of difficult treatment, a lot of difficult meds.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Right.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
That puts you in a place where you enter a
survival mode, which means now so many other things start
to feel like a luxury. Right, Like, when you're in
survival mode, you're just doing everything you can to make
it through the day, to make it through the week,
to make it to the end of the month. And
when you're in survival mode, yeah, it can be very
(24:02):
hard to be creative during that time. And again, that's
another time in your life that somebody telling you to
go away to a cabin when you may be broke
and you may not be able to afford to take
some trip somewhere else so that you can have a break.
You may literally be going through a time in your
life that you're not gonna have that break and you're
not gonna have another place that you can go to.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Right.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
So, I think it's important to speak to that because
whenever we give sort of and when I say we,
I mean the people who have podcasts have social media platforms.
Whenever we air quotes give advice to people and we're like, oh,
you just need to It's really never that simple, right.
And the last reason, which seems simple but I do
(24:49):
think is a factor, is just pure exhaustion, not really
having had time that you've rested, whether that means sleep
or whether that means just this time that you weren't
having to pull on the part of yourself that your
creativity would be coming from. Right, these are reasons you
(25:09):
may be experiencing creative block. Okay, so what do you
do when you experience creative block? And one of the
things that I want to say to you that I
think is so important is that you should remember that
when you experience creative block, never forget that your healing
is more important than your output. And the truth is,
(25:32):
especially for those of us who also work in creative world,
your clients are not necessarily going to say that to you.
The team that you work with may not necessarily say
that to you. Your boss may not say that to you,
But it is true your healing is more important than
your output because at the end of the day, you
(25:52):
only have one you, and you have to take care
of yourself. The amount of albums you put out out
the amount of paragraphs or stanzas that you write, the
amount of design that you can say you completed, the
amount of photography that you can say you've done. All
those things are not more important than your health all around.
(26:17):
And we can think of examples ad nauseum of people
whose art we love right but we lost them sooner
than we wanted to because their output, unfortunately became more
important to the people around them than their health or
their healing. So that's my first thing what to do
(26:39):
when you experienced creative block, Remember that and think about
are there things in your life right now that are wounded?
Do you have these areas of life where you have
all this unprocessed grief, unprocessed disappointment, unprocessed time that you've
been in a survival And I want to say, I
(27:01):
feel like I'm always like a both and so here's
my both. And I want to say, on the one hand,
sometimes you need to heal before you can create, And
I think this is different for every person, So you
have to find which one of these people is you.
But a lot of times for me, I'm not a
cathartic creator. I'm not someone that when I'm going through
stuff it's my writing that I pour that into, or
(27:23):
it's you know, other art that I pour that into.
For me, I don't actually emotionally multitask very well. So
for me sometimes I have to take some time to
heal and then return to the creative process. And it
can also be true that there are some people that
it is creating that is a part of your healing process.
(27:43):
It is being creative that is a part of the
way that you begin to process grief, or process trauma,
or process things that have been disappointing to you or
hurtful to you, or even sometimes process things that have
been really amazing and you just don't even know how
you process that at the moment. That can also be true.
(28:05):
I think you also have to release yourself from toxic productivity.
I think we could all, for twenty twenty two stand
to do more of this. And you know, is toxic
productivity connected to a lot of things. Yes, it is
connected to capitalism. It is definitely connected to white supremacy.
It is baked in a lot of our those of
(28:25):
us that live in the States here, It's baked in
a lot of our American way of being. It can
be baked into a very Western way of being, but
we need to release ourselves from that and find ways
to do that. I'm going to talk about that a
little more later. Another tip I'll give you of what
to do when you experience creative block is to take
in the creativity of other people. This isn't always to
(28:47):
take in their creativity so that you can be like, oh,
let me take that and just make this thing they made.
That's not what I mean when I say that, But
I mean it can be helpful to take in the
wonderful and beautiful and fascinating and provocative things that other
creative people have made. And I'll tell you what it
does for me. Because sometimes, of course, our ego is
(29:08):
connected to our creative process, right. We bring our ego
into the room in some ways, and some of us
have to do that, right, some of the art we make,
like we have to have some ego, We have to
have some confidence about it, or why would we do
what we're doing if we didn't have a little bit
of that. But I think there are times that we
end up putting too much pressure on ourselves, as if
(29:30):
the whole world is going to crumble if we don't
know fill in the blank. With whatever your art is.
So for me, the whole world's going to crumble if
I don't finish this poem. The whole world is going
to crumble. If I don't come up with an amazing
podcast idea. The whole world is going to fall apart
if I don't paint this the exact right way, if
I don't design this the exact right way, if I
(29:50):
don't make this film the exact right way right. And
I think that's putting too much pressure on ourselves. And
I will tell you one thing that I've started doing
adding to my routine as I started taking very small
steps back into my writing process is I've started adding
just a few minutes of reading to that time. And
(30:12):
I have other times that I read, but I have
very specific books that I like to read before I'm
about to write, and I just had to start out really,
really small. So I think I started out where of
those books I would put my timer on and maybe
read for five minutes or ten minutes, typically no longer
than ten minutes. And one of the books I'm reading
right now during my writing time is I'm reading Black
(30:34):
Women Writers by Claudia Tate. I don't even know if
this book is still in print because I found it
at a thrift store. Book Boy, is it wonderful because
Claudia Tate is interviewing a lot of amazing Black women writers,
and I think the book came out either in the
late seventies or early eighties, so you're seeing these interviews
with Maya Angelo and Ugh, I mean, so many amazing
(30:54):
Black women writers in this book. And even reading that
book for ten minutes, it did a thing to me
that I didn't think it was going to do. It
actually calmed me down and helped me to take less
pressure off of what happens when I write. Because reading
about these black women and thinking to myself, you know,
in my family, in my bloodline, I am a part
(31:14):
of a long line of women that have had a
wonderful and amazing and difficult and complicated lives, right and
there are so many strides that they made in their
own lives that have paved the way for me. So
in certain ways, that is a part of what gives
me the confidence to do what I'm doing that I
(31:35):
know these women paved the way for me. I hope
that in my lifetime I'm paving the way for the
other folks to come after me, but creatively, I think
that can be helpful too. There was something about me
reading the words of these black women that they were
actually writing, some of them around the time that I
was born, and thinking to myself, like, these are geniuses.
(31:56):
These are black women who are just brilliant and their
work had such an impact on the world, you know,
And that means my charge is to come to the
page or to the creative process and be myself because
these women have come before me. I need to come
(32:17):
to the page the same way that they came to
the page as they are, as who they are, with
their ideas and I don't know, y'all. Something about that
just helped me to relax a bit and take the
pressure off of myself that it's not that the world's
going to crumble if I don't write this poem. It's
that I want to write this poem because it's important
(32:38):
to me to say, or because I have something funny
to say, or because I hope me writing this will
bring somebody else to laugh about the absurdity of life,
or whatever is bringing me to that writing process, right,
So take in the creativity of other people because it
can remind you that as a creative you are a
part of a community of people making things. It is
(33:00):
not all on your shoulders to make all the things.
It's on your shoulders to be exactly who you are
to make what you have in your hands, in your
mind and your soul to make. And the last thing
I would say what to do when you experienced creative block,
just start small and try. You might even cry the
(33:20):
first time you come back to it. You might not
write anything, or create anything, or draw anything that you
think is worth anything at all, But just start small
and try. Those of us who are writers talk about
the idea of and I'm not sure whose quote this is,
(33:41):
but this idea of sort of writing with the door closed,
and then you edit with the door open, to mean
that you have a certain part of your process as
a writer that it's just you and the page there.
And then you get to a point where you can
open up what you've made to an editor or to
other people to get perspective, to get feedback or whatever.
(34:03):
And I think sometimes we can get to a point where,
especially between social media and all these other things, that
there's so much of what we create that immediately is
out there to the public that then it can feel
challenging to sort of close that door again and go
back to where it's just you and your voice and
your stories and your creativity and your ideas in the room.
(34:26):
But go back and start small. Even if you just
can only do five minutes of sketching, or you can
only do five minutes of beginning a little bit of choreography,
or whatever the creative thing is you do, just start
small and try. And when you start small, don't let
yourself feel beholden to how what you're making will be
(34:51):
in the public, you know, or how it will be
received when it's out there. It's also okay to make
things that nobody ever sees, or to make things just
because you want to see where it goes. And I
think when we start sort of taking all of the
faceless voices and eyes out of the room with us,
then we can really return back to our true process.
(35:15):
I want to speak quickly before I end the episode
about what to do about creative block when creative work
is your livelihood. I want to speak to my freelancers,
my entrepreneurs, my artist entrepreneurs, my people who work for
creative agencies and you know, work for companies where you
also are doing creative work there, What do you do
(35:37):
when you're experiencing creative block? Because even though I don't
believe in said white Man author's thing about the plumbing,
when you do creative work for a living, you don't
always have the luxury of being able to be like, Wow,
I'm tired, and I don't want to do this right now,
because your rent, or your or car payment, or your
(36:01):
insurance or whatever bills you may have are connected to
whether or not you can conjure up this creativity right.
So here's some tips for you find one small way
this year to create something just because you want to.
For those of us who do creative work as our
livelihood or as our job or vocation, occupation, whichever way
(36:24):
you refer to it, I think we can become well
known for being able to take what other people want
to make something creative, and we can do a really
great job taking their ideas, their initiatives, or whatever it is,
and making it amazing. And then we look up and
we're so drained that we don't have the energy anymore
(36:46):
to really do something just because we want to, just
because we want to experiment with it, We want to
see how it turns out. We're not sure. We don't
know all those things, right. I want to speak a
little bit about the cycle of making things we love
and then clients loving what we made, and then ending
up getting paid for the thing that we started doing
(37:08):
because we loved it, right, and then somehow it sort
of feels can not always, but can feel a little tainted,
a little corrupted, right that you were like, oh, I
started out doing this thing just because I wanted to. Well,
now it's part of my job to do that thing.
Or now a client has seen me doing that thing
(37:29):
and they want that exact thing, and so then that
becomes a part of the business. And sometimes that also
gets disconnected from what you loved about what you were
doing in the first place, which is a really hard cycle.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
Right.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
So I want you to think about you may have
made something that then led to you getting to where
you could do this as your livelihood, which is an
amazing opportunity to have. If you get this opportunity, it's great,
it's great sometimes mostly it's great to be able to
have the opportunity to do what you love and make
(38:02):
a living at it. If that's something that you always
dreamed of doing. But it's also okay to think about
some ways to return to what you loved about that
before there were clients, before there were brands to partner with,
before all of that, Like how do you return to
the roots of what you're doing? You know? For me,
that was going to open mics and hearing other poets
(38:25):
in the city I traveled a lot. Most of my
performances were traveled for a very long time. So there
was something good for me about returning to the roots
of spoken word in Atlanta and getting to sit and
listen to other poets, getting to take my new stuff
that I was still like working the kinks out of.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
You know.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
That's one way that I go back to the roots
of what I love, you know, So think about that
for yourself. And another thing I would say for my
people that like, this is your job, job. One thing
that you can do about creative block when your creative
work is your life flihood is think about how to
institute more rhythms of rest into your work. Think about
(39:06):
how to not have your rhythm of work or your
pace of life in your job to be where your
creativity is constantly being pulled on without you having an
opportunity to pour back into yourself. So when I say rest,
yes I mean sleep as well. Yes I mean taking
vacation time when you can take it, or stay cation
(39:27):
time even if you can't afford to go somewhere, can
you afford to stay at your home, but have some
days where you're not having to constantly be pulled on
by all the people that want want, want from you.
And lastly, for everybody, whether you work in a creative
field or not, whatever your creative art is, find small
(39:49):
ways to return to what you love and why you
loved it in the first place. I want you to
think about that for a minute. Think about the creative
thing that you miss doing the most, or that you
remember loving doing the most, and think about the you
that just was starting out, you know, Like for me,
I can think about the girl that went to her
first open mic when she was like nineteen years old
(40:13):
and heard some of the most amazing poetry she'd ever
heard in her life, and also realized how bad her
poetry was all at the same time, you know, And
how I went home that night after that first open
mic feeling so charged up to write and write better
(40:34):
and perform better and having this willingness to keep showing
up even though I was gonna stumble and fumble and
mess up and forget my poem I was trying to memorize.
You know, go back to those roots for yourself in
whatever way, and find small ways to return to that.
I believe the same thing about creativity that I believe
(40:55):
about cooking. We talk about this a lot, those of
us who grew up eating soul food. That's a very
very like, very Black community central idea that when we
make soul food, what makes it delicious is yes, someone
who can technically cook right, but it's someone who puts
the love in it when they cook. And you want
(41:16):
to feel that feeling when you're being creative. You want
to be putting the love in it. And if you've
gotten to the point where you're not putting the love
in it, I hope you'll go back and think about
what's causing that block. For you is a period of
resting and not making. What you need is therapy. What
you need is time with your friends who are not
(41:37):
super concerned with whatever you do at work. They just
love you for you. Is that what you need? Whatever
you need take care of yourself. This year. Go gently
into the year, Go gently into your goals. Be kind
to your body, be kind to your past self, be
kind to who you are right now. That's the way
(42:00):
we start the new year.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
See y'all next week.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
Her with Amina Brown is produced by Matt Owen for
Sober Feedy Productions as a part of the Seneca Women
Podcast Network and partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening, and
don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast.
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