When Creating is Painful

Can I confess something to you?

The first thing to go for me is writing.

I know, I know. I’m a bad arts minister. I talk and talk and talk about the merits of taking time to create, how it’s important, how it takes discipline, how it’s part of our calling, but I’m a horrible hypocrite, when push comes to shove.

Every time, EVERY TIME, I choose connecting with someone over writing.

And it’s easy enough to paint the struggle as noble if that was all that it was, but sometimes I choose… nothing!

I think about sitting down to write and I feel so prematurely exhausted that I turn on the tv or lay down and scroll through my phone or invent another obligation.

I’m very creative at non-creation; yesterday, I cleared out literally hundreds of old emails from my inbox. Last week, I researched keyboard cleaning methods. Today, I hemmed and hawed over a free Starbucks drink.

I feel this terrible urgency. It’s not that I don’t have ideas, because I do, it’s that I know that in order to put any of them on the page, I will have to slow down, and open myself up, and feel the things I’m feeling, and man, especially in this pandemic, I just… don’t want to sometimes.

I have found that the same sense of vulnerability and pouring my heart out doesn’t apply when it isn’t my primary art form, so this pandemic, I’ve devoted creative hours to playwriting, to acting, to ukulele and painting and lots of things I know I’m not good at, and phew, the pressure goes off.

Painfulness gives way to playfulness.

So there’s a concrete recommendation!

But I also am wrestling with when and how it’s appropriate to force myself to write anyway. When and how I need to make myself be vulnerable, even though, duh, I don’t want to. When and how should I probe into those places of pain?

So here’s an opposite recommendation: Have community that won’t let you hide from your feelings forever. For me, right now, it’s our writing and spirituality group. Every other week, I have to churn out an assignment that forces me to take that pen and poke at myself until something comes out. Every time, I dread it and avoid it and then stare down the deadline and make it happen.

And you know what? It does hurt. But it’s also a genuine relief.