How Can I Be More Creative? Grow Through The Guilt.
When people ask, How can I be more creative? I admit, I don’t get the question. I really need a little more clarification. Because, you’re creating each and every breath and experience you have in each and every moment, so, when are you not creative?
But I know, there’s something in “How can I be more creative?” that’s not answered by my philosophical belief in the inherent creativity of life itself. It isn’t helpful when you’re feeling down on yourself. So, I’m going to change the question, and lay down a perspective on what stops us from feeling creative instead. Which gets us to the same place.
This is part one of, I’m not sure how many yet, a series on what stops us from being creative. (If you’re on the newsletter list, you’ll get notifications of when the next one is ready!)
(By the way, this perspective is especially for those of us raised to conform to a traditionally female ideal.)
How can I stop The Guilt from keeping me from feeling creative?
If you’re like me, things play something out like this:
Taking care of my family is the most noble calling in my life, but just between us girls, it’s kind of exhausting! I should be doing some self-care, so I go exercise or knit. I should be loving myself, so I schedule a pedicure… or knit. Then, I feel guilty. I go back to chores and smiling and making sure it-all-gets-done so I can earn a night out painting by number while I complain about my kids’ school with some other ladies. But that’s all the time away I’m allowed, so I’ll volunteer for the bake sale so I can get out of the house without feeling guilty because, look, I’m supporting-the-school like a Good Mom. But one day, it all piles up and I snap. What is all this for??? Guess it’s time for mommy to have another pedicure!
“How do you make art when the art that’s all around you keeps telling you to shut up and do the dishes?”
My story is pretty stay-at-home-mom-centric, but you get the idea. If you’re like me, you feel like there’s a List of Things You’re Allowed to Want. Pedicures and occasional dinners out are on my list, but only if the kids wore matching socks every day this week. Fulfillment that involves anything that’s not explicitly connected to the roles of wife and mother? Not on The List.
What keeps me sticking to The List year after year? Guilt. I cannot stand feeling the guilt.
In Rage Becomes Her, Soraya Chemaly talks about an “ethos of sacrifice,” this cultural idea that the value of women comes in how much they give of themselves to others. So, in order to be a Valuable Woman, I can’t want anything that’s not on The List.
But I do.
Cue: more guilt.
I go back to The List.
And eventually, I get a little feral.
“So we do not honor our own bodies, curiosity, hunger, judgment, experience, or ambition. Instead, we lock away our true selves. Women who are best at this disappearing act earn the highest praise: She is so selfless. Can you imagine? The epitome of womanhood is to lose one’s self completely.”
Over the years, I’ve become conditioned to feel guilty every time I want what matters to me to matter.
If you see yourself in this conundrum, it’s not your fault. It’s the patriarchy’s fault that it stuffed you into pre-defined roles in the first place and didn’t teach you how to just be the amazing person you are.
I think this is important to identify, though I’m not interested in spending too much time griping about the patriarchy when so many others have already done a great job of it. (Follow the links and quotes here for some feminist books that have spoken to me—obviously!) Here’s what’s important:
The culture you grew up in never taught you how to trust yourself and want what you want. It may have even taught you that it’s bad to trust yourself and want what matters to you. So, it’s pretty normal, given the circumstances, to not know what you want and even to not feel allowed to want things at all. It’s normal to feel the guilt, because you’re supposed to, under this system.
It means there’s nothing wrong with you. And once you know that, you can stop fighting with yourself and change things.
“If you were raised in a culture shaped by Human Giver Syndrome, you were taught to prioritize being pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others, above anything else. Maybe—maybe—you can pursue your own personal (read: selfish) Something Larger, if you’ve thoroughly met the needs of everyone else and don’t stop being pretty and calm while you do it.”
You can learn to grow through the guilt to the other side, if you choose. Here’s a few steps to get you started.
When I coach others, I always start with compassion. I find that it’s the soil that supports the most growth, for a couple reasons.
For one, being compassionate toward ourselves, instead of judgmental, allows greater honesty. When we know we’re not going to beat ourselves up for being a normal human, we are free to be curious about what’s actually going on. We need to be honest with ourselves if we’re going to get anywhere that matters to us.
It’s also simply more motivating and effective to move toward a thing we’ve honestly admitted that we want than it is to move away from what we fear, which is the shame and guilt we’ve been conditioned to feel when we stop perpetually sacrificing ourselves. Being compassionate helps free us from getting bogged down in the “not good enough” storylines and see that we’re right where we need to be to go where we want to go from here. Already.
You can practice self-compassion by
Reminding yourself that it’s normal to struggle; we all do.
Imagining what you might tell a friend if they were struggling like you are, then offering yourself the same words.
Touching in with your values, and reminding yourself that, if you didn’t really, truly care about those you love, you wouldn’t struggle with guilt in the first place.
(If you want more ways to explore self-compassion, I can’t recommend Dr. Kristin Neff’s work highly enough.)
After you’ve started with self-compassion, a few other things you can do to address the guilt that’s blocking you from your inherent creativity:
Mindfulness and meditation—mindfulness practices help you connect with your body’s sensations, which can help it feel safer when we experience guilt. Meditation improves our ability to “sit with” uncomfortable feelings and respond to them with intention, instead of reacting in avoidance because we simply can’t stand them. A book I love to help get started with mindful meditation practices is Tea & Cake With Demons by Adreanna Limbach.
Holding Space for your vulnerability—there is something incredibly powerful in sharing and witnessing each other’s vulnerable truths. The Guilt thrives in silence, so in speaking it, we go another step further to remove the judgment around it. Brené Brown’s BRAVING Inventory can help you identify a person in your personal circle you could trust to have that conversation, and a therapist or coach may be a great solution.
Claim your truth—When you’ve created a compassionate space for yourself, alone or with support, name what you want. Or, name the frustration you feel that you don’t know what you want! Whatever you know is true is what you want to speak.
From there, take baby steps. You don’t need to solve all your problems in one day! This is big, big work. Really big. Taking a tiny step in the direction you want to go (which includes figuring out where you want to go) and seeing a tiny result (even if it’s just, hey, the world didn’t end when I did that!) will begin to build your trust in yourself and the process.
“When anyone thinks a woman who serves “gives ’cause that’s what mothers or real women do,” they deny her full humanity and thus fail to see the generosity inherent in her acts.”
This may not sound like much, but it’s a lot. I keep saying that because it’s easy to downplay how hard growth is when we’re accustomed to self-criticism. I believe that when we give ourselves a space to grow in, we will, because we know deep inside what to do.
My friend, this, right here, is my work. And I would be honored to support you if The Guilt is keeping you from making what matters to you with your life. You can send me a message and we can chat about what your dreams might look like, once you give yourself permission to grow through the guilt toward them.
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