I Feel Stuck At Work. How Do I Find New Outlets For Creativity?
Your curiosity for a more authentic life has to be greater than your limitations. Come Home: The Advice Column
Welcome back to Come Home: The Advice Column, where you have the answers.
This week’s submission:
I feel stuck at work/with my/a career—on the one hand I want to do good things for people and the community, on the other, I’ve been in nonprofits my whole career and would like to make more money and do something that’s new and creative, and on a whole other side of things, I feel pressured to perform and achieve in ways that feel entirely linked to capitalism rather than actual desire, so I tend to shirk new responsibilities and avoid potential failures and scare myself out of trying before even developing a new thought. How do you find new outlets without adding stressors?
The Venn diagram for creating good shit and doing shadow work is a full circle.
Both require: honoring instinct as cue for what needs to be further excavated, relinquishing control to the unknown, and exercising radical acceptance for the mess you will inevitably kick up while diving head first into the mystery goo that is the creative process. You may not receive a cookie for doing either, and that has to be okay and shouldn’t be the point. Setting unrealistic expectations, committing to challenges, and even creating goals before you let yourself dream, and become acquainted with the purpose of the work - your Why - is stopping you dead in your tracks on all fronts. Creativity is infinite, as is your personal growth. It can take form as a Saturday morning ritual that keeps you tethered to a reality beyond your obligations or morph into a full-blown multimedia empire years from now, and either way you have to start at the same place. Your curiosity for a more authentic life has to be greater than your limitations.
Start small by simply naming your desire every single day. What’s your thing? Whether it’s making floral arrangements, writing, or knitting, start declaring your thing as an act of vulnerability and accountability, and a commitment to newness. As a living prayer to your offering in this life. For me, becoming a creative really started with simply introducing myself to the world and my own graces as a creative. In the earliest days of my career, when my bills were being paid by brunch tips and I had yet to book a single job, I would sit in a coffee shop and practice doing exactly what I do professionally now. The regulars at the shop took notice and would ask “what do you do?” to which I replied I was a model, and most importantly, I was in search of mentors, collaborators, and friends of similar interest. I met the first photographer who ever shot photos of me within the first week of this ritual, and those photos - along with screaming out into the ether I do in fact exist and dream of a life much bigger than the one I could see - booked me my first job two months later.
Since then, I’ve struggled with calling myself an artist because of the imaginary gatekeepers on my shoulder telling me nobody was buying into what I create. Still, far before I published anything notable I called myself a writer because there was not a single passing day I didn’t write something, and I’d already seen the return in spell work of aligning my thoughts, actions, and declarations. Sitting in a co-working space for hours on end, toiling over work that nobody would see on my day off seems ridiculous in retrospect, but it is exactly how I got here. Each day was a sweet whisper to the universe that I was ready to receive the creative process, not just achievement in creative fields, as my life’s purpose. As I became more committed to creating for creation’s sake, I understood the point of my personal creative practice was to let dedication to my gifts guide me to projects and opportunity, rather than centering opportunity itself.
Stop thinking of showing up for yourself as a stressor. I’ve recently started taking pottery lessons on the same day I publish my newsletter as an exercise of channeling creativity into something I don’t pay bills with, and letting off some steam. Every week I look at my calendar and wonder if I should cancel because I can already intuit the exhaustion I will feel days from now. Every single week I leave class having failed a dozen times in two hours, created the wonkiest piece of trash I’ve ever seen, and feeling more satisfied than a pig in shit for having let myself make bright, gorgeous mistakes and thrown them into a kiln to be solidified forever. For years, I didn’t attempt anything that was not a guaranteed success (read more about that here) for an entire complex of reasons including the fact that I viewed my energy as more useful in surviving than dreaming and playing. You are inadvertently putting finding joy at the bottom of your priority list, which as you mentioned is a function of capitalism, but can be rewired with even an hour of your time on a consistent basis. I’m not saying the guilt will go away entirely, because this is generational trauma and late-stage capitalism we’re talking about, but baby steps.
Contrary to increasingly popular belief and social media economy, not everything creative need be monetized. Dipping your toes into the sticky, soul-stirring, and sometimes self-esteem shattering process of making precious, but nebulous shit with a career in mind is not the best approach because it allows very little room for failure. You’re already overwhelming brand new intuitive, spiritual, and emotional muscles with the obligation to perform well and sustain your life, rather than enriching it. Try witnessing what it feels, tastes, smells, and looks like to be in creative flow and letting that sensation become your Why.
You will absolutely have to let go of fear of failure. Failure is not only inevitable, but constant and necessary; and seldom as painful as you think it’s going to be in the context of just doing a new thing. As I’ve walked each day in my purpose, I realized I actually meet failure every day but I’m too focused on the path to care. Capitalism has of course tricked us into believing that failure only surfaces as life or death, eat or starve, sink or swim, which is why it seems you can only envision starting the creative process with the intent to possibly make a living out of it, or becoming something greater than just fun. The conditions make it challenging to think there will ever be enough time in the day to create and work so we either have to choose one over the other, or make them the same thing. But what if that is a false choice, and the other option is believing that “fun” is enough of a reason to consistently show up for something new even if you might suck at it? Frankly, that is the reason I have a career. I simply kept chasing fun, facing failure and deciding which experience was more deserving of my attention on any given day. Failure in the creative process feels more like tripping up the stairs the majority of the time. Like you may bruise your shin and be a bit embarrassed should anyone witness it, but it may actually expedite your journey up and you find out what happens when you race time in creativity.
I would love to see you show a bit more grace for yourself.
I actually don’t believe for a second that you are “shirking new responsibilities,” but rather overwhelmed at the prospect that you have to actually work in order to survive because none of us should have to, and are at complete capacity for intake of any kind. And creativity requires capacity. That’s why Dolly Parton was able to write Jolene and I Will Always Love You on the same day. Heartbreak, loss, failure, being brought to your knees, are sources of the most profound creations of our time for one simple reason - they create space. For the same reason, we were going bonkers baking sourdough bread for the first few months of quarantine, we are capable of accessing parts of ourselves we haven’t before when we have time to be witness to a process.
The Powers That Be are quaking in their little boots every day that we as a society might actually find the magic of play. In play, we discover what exists beyond routine, skip into new truths that the hustle and bustle of daily life leaves us too exhausted to interrogate further, and we let the unknown reveal itself in the safest place available to us - our imaginations. There, we can allow many apparently opposing truths to exist in the same place - like the many you listed in your submission - and find our way to something authentic to us smack dab in the middle of the extremes we’ve created to limit our possibilities.
For example, it sounds like you believe being of service to community and of service to yourself are mutually exclusive concepts. It also sounds like you waver between wanting to be financially secure and feeling guilty for it. Our gifts and owning them are our service to mankind; you just have to find out how to wield them in a way that is both sustainable and helpful. The more you invest in yourself, the more you broaden the well from which you can return to fill your cup, and subsequently pour into your community. Which brings me to my next point - you gotta release your attachment to martyrdom. Everything you wrote leads me to believe that you think you are only a good and virtuous person if you are overworked, underpaid, and overly generous with your time (like, spending 5 days a week performing a task for other people that’s leaving you completely depleted). Who are you proving your goodness to and when will your sacrifice be enough? You are good, full stop.
Regardless of where you choose to go next in your career or discovery in your creative process, you will naturally find a way to integrate your gifts into service of your community because that’s who you are. You do not have to sacrifice a financially secure life and fulfillment to be someone who is of their community, and it’s time to be honest with yourself about the ways you may be using that as an excuse to avoid trying something new. I’ve learned to simplify my life and choices by trusting the path of my greatest joy is inherently the strength of my community, and you can do the same.
Let’s try creativity on for size and let it take form as it sees fit. This creative process is not only external; it’s the process of crumbling and reformulating how you view purpose and embodying it in your daily ritual. I want you to give yourself more credit. You already know capitalism is a rigged game, you know how you’re getting in your own way; now you need to ask yourself why you keep knocking on monotony’s door when adventure calls. Don’t underestimate the spell we cast when our actions, intentions, and words come into alignment. You have something in mind, you have plotted and dreamed of exactly how to make it happen, and then you’ve shamed yourself before there is anything to be ashamed of, which tells me you’re already familiar with the creative process ;) Now all you have to do is add actual creation into the mix. 1 hour a week for you is not too much, and soon won’t be enough.
Always just on time ❤️