Discovering your Creative Treasures
Just when I thought I’d finally got my story all figured out and knew exactly what was coming next, without warning, things got messy. Really messy.
Don’t you find that when you pull one, seemingly insignificant thread, thought or idea, very quickly it can feel like your whole story is beginning to unravel around you?
That’s exactly what happened with my writing this week. I lost all sense of direction and suddenly I didn’t know where I was going, or even, where I was. And that, felt deeply uncomfortable!
‘What if I never find my way out of this mess? What if I’ve become so tangled up in it, I can’t move beyond it? What if I get stuck here? What if I can never finish this story?’
The panic creeps in, doesn’t it?
But what if, rather than fighting and fearing the mess, we learned to embrace it, enjoy it even? What if we stopped seeing it as something that is standing in our way and instead saw it as an essential detour on our writing journey, helping us to get where we most want to be?
As humans we don’t tend to like mess, we prefer order because we understand order, we can make sense out of it, and that gives us the feeling at least, of being in control which makes us feel safe. Feeling 'out of control' can feel dangerous, disorientating, and often, totally debilitating. This is why, for the most part, we try to maintain some degree of control over pretty much every aspect of our lives; our careers, our relationships, our finances, our weight, even our emotions. So, it’s only natural then, that when we embark on the creative process we do so with that same mindset – we want to be in total control of it.
Except, here’s the thing – we can’t be!
We cannot control the creative process; we can only choose to collaborate with it.
To embrace the mess and endure the discomfort, we must relinquish our need for control and surrender to the mysterious force that is the creative process, trusting that the journey we are being taken on, is the one we must go on, whether we're comfortable with it or not.
By surrendering to the creative process and handing over our control we stop struggling and fighting with it and instead we accept the invitation to sink, more willingly, into the depths of it. This is how creative collaboration begins.
By dropping deeper into the process, into the unknown and into the mystery of it all, we begin to enter a new realm of discovery and potential. We begin to access deeper realms of our story, of our characters, of our imagination, of our process, of our consciousness and ultimately, of ourselves. By making this descent we are dropping deeper into the well of our own creativity. And at the bottom of that well, is where our creative treasures and riches lie.
So, the next time you encounter the messiness of the creative process, like I did this week, and feel like everything is beginning to unravel around you, resist the need to control it, instead choose simply, to go with it!
Choose to collaborate with your creativity and get curious about where the process might be leading you and what treasures you might find there.
Then take a deep breath and dive into its murky depths, knowing that when you resurface, which you always will, you will be holding something you didn’t have before, something that was always in you, waiting to be discovered, hoping to be found.
Surely that’s worth the discomfort. It always is for me.