My five-year-old son has been talking about wanting a penpal for weeks months.
I was so into it. We brainstormed about who could become his penpal. We decided on his friend Maya, and we discussed paper options. I thought I was winning the mom game with all of my YES-ANDING.
He kept asking to write a letter and mail it. I said yes! Of course babe! But I don’t sit down with him and do it because where in the hell did I put those envelopes. And his sister is peeing on my leg. And this doctor’s appointment. And. And. And.
Weeks pass. Then a month.
One morning, he wakes up asking again whether he could write a letter. I half-heartedly tell him we will try to make time for it before breakfast. And then I burn the pancakes. And I forget that it’s recycling day. And. And. And.
Later that day, he has a next-level meltdown and throws an ice-cream play-dough maker at my head. At one point I am running away from him while he tries to bite my hand. What is wrong with him? I rage-say inside of myself while trying to calmly name his feelings using my best Dr. Becky sturdy leader parent script.
Finally he quiets and says: Can I have a hug? What’s going on for you right now, I wondered aloud. I was so exasperated and did not know.
I just really wanted to write that letter to Maya, he said.
OH.
Creative desires don’t always need to be addressed immediately. But if left unattended or pushed aside for too long, they start to make their voice known in other, usually inconvenient ways.
Unexpected irritability at your assistant or your spouse. An epic meltdown. Burnout. A hard-to-shake lack of aliveness. (Everything is fine). Anxiety.
All acts of creation begin with creative desire. Inside of this desire are the seeds of our creative potential.
To pay attention to and follow our creative desires is one of the most essential aspects of creative health and a fully expressed life.
And yet.
We live in a culture that does everything it can to keep us from our truest creative desires, since its very survival depends on telling us what we want.
As women we are taught that our desires are not welcome if they don’t involve caregiving or making someone else more comfortable, and they always require an explanation or justification.
Instead of nurturing our desires, we learn to be at war with them, and to suppress, ignore, and negotiate ourselves out of what we truly want.
Consider asking yourself:
Growing up, what did I learn about creative desire? And how is that showing up in my process now?
Creative desires evolve into our most original expressions, and reveal new parts of ourselves. They make themselves known to us before concrete, linear plans, and any sense of viability. Another amazing thing about them: they don’t lie.
Creative desires are especially important to listen to when we are going through periods of creative plateaus, stuckness, metamorphosis, reinvention, expansion, and grief – whether individual or collective.
Take heed: they do not fit neatly inside of your life as it is now, because their one big job is to expand your life.
And so: your creative desires will often make other people in your life — and your inner critic — uncomfortable.
These truths, combined with the crappy cultural conditioning around desire means that when creative desires come to us, instead of feeling beautiful and warm, they often feel like an ache. Angst. Anger with nowhere to go. A quiet longing.
We’ve been taught to solve or fix these culturally inappropriate feelings instead of considering that they might be creative desires trying to communicate with us.
When we finally sat down to write, my son’s face lit up. We wrote and mailed the letter and I did one too and he couldn’t stop smiling and I was so into it that I pitched a weekly family letter-writing ritual and he was like easy tiger let’s just mail this one and go from there.
But it was a joyful process and much less energetically costly than putting it off another day. Creative desires don’t need us to drop everything, but attending to them can catalyze miracles.
3 PROMPTS TO UNLOCK CREATIVE DESIRE:
1. When it comes to this chapter of my life, what do I want to create?
2. If anything were possible — and I couldn’t fail or disappoint anyone — what do I really, really want?
3. What is my deep self most longing for right now?
Something I learned at 40 that I wish I’d learned at 5: your creative desire is meant for you.
If you have a desire, especially one that won’t let go of you, you are meant to bring it forth.
If that resonates, maybe this is the sign you’ve been looking for.
THE DESIRE EXPERIMENT:
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For the next 7 days, listen to your creative desires.
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Be open to new and familiar desires. Treat them as if they matter and are worthy of your attention. Don’t question their validity, demand a practical justification, or negotiate with them. Just listen. Identify patterns. Write them down if you dare.
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Then choose one that you’re drawn to and hang out with it for 15 minutes. You don’t have to produce anything or go after a result. Witness it. Journal on it. Look at it from different angles. Make it a playlist. See where it takes you.
New motherhood kicked up my already flourishing perfectionism to such debilitating levels that caused me to mainly ignore my desire to write for the last several years.
That’s nice that you want to play around with your writing, but you don’t have time a voice in my head says. Because clients and kids need your attention. Because people don’t want to read what you write. Because the polycrisis. Because. Because. Because.
In a scarcity-driven, linear time model, nurturing a creative desire means you are taking energy away from other, culturally-proclaimed “more important things,” and that creative desires can be addressed only after the responsibilities of life are dealt with.
Let’s be clear: the psychological, physical, and emotional demands of raising young kids or caregiving or leading teams or maintaining your humanity in a broken world are REAL and they legitimately take our time and energy away from creative work and at times can make it impossible.
But what if our creative desires matter anyway? Because what if they do more than we think?
If our relationship with our creativity is the fulcrum around which all the other relationships of our lives work, what if attending to one creative desire actually helps everything else?
Welcome to NONLINEAR. This newsletter is dedicated to reclaiming our creativity in a culture that depends on us staying small and silent. My intention is to offer you invitations, tools, and experiments to support the unfolding of your wild and unapologetic creative life and specifically to help you:
– reconnect with your spark and sense of creative aliveness in the midst of all you/we are navigating
– unlock creative bravery and flow in unexpected places
– reclaim whatever parts of your creative self need attention
– catalyze miracles and quantum leaps in your creative process
– fortify your daring choice to live a creative life in this heartbreaking geo-political moment
The goal of authoritarianism and facism is to keep us creatively underexpressed. It thrives on our quiet, our creative contraction, and our feeling out of trust in this most essential relationship.
To bravely reclaim our creativity is to bravely defy the control of authoritarian rule, an algorithm designed to drain us of our creative life force, and a culture hell bent on telling you what you want and what you think.
The creative act is an antidote to oppressive control.
It is my highest intention to be a safe place for you, exactly as you are, and my commitment is steadfast in helping you feel creatively expressed because 1. this is your birthright and 2. we need your voice to make this place beautiful.
Welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.
READING, LISTENING, LEARNING, ACTING:
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Printing out these Ten Commandments of Defiance and so GRATEFUL for this incredible living resource page to help us resist and THRIVE.
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How to Protect Kids From ICE on the We Can Do Hard Things Podcast
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Deepa Iyer’s Social Change Ecosystem and her catalytic framework that it takes all of us. I think I’m a combination of an Experimenter and a Visionary. You?
3 QUOTES ON MY HEART AND MIND:
1.
…We want the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and who can see through our fear-stricken society… to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers…poets, and visionaries who can remember freedom.
— URSULA K. LE GUIN
2.
Desire is possibility seeking expression.
— RALPH WALDO EMERSON
3.
Do not abandon your Loving nature now in the face of harm. Deepen it. Do not let go of your people now as malice rises. Hold them closer. Humanize those being dehumanized. Stock up on soulfulness for this season. Do not lose your integrity. Fortify it in the forge of your faith. Do not silence your sacred song. Free it. Make medicine with your music.
— DR. JAIYA JOHN
A note about AI:
This letter was written entirely by me. And I probably spent way too long writing it. #nonlinearducks
