I’ve been dithering around this morning, thinking about what to write to you and convincing myself that I have nothing interesting to say. This is, indeed, a curiosity to me because I am a person who speaks at a thousand miles an hour and is not short on ideas, and yet on occasion, when faced with the blinking cursor and the blank page, I find that words all my words have gone and hidden in various corners of the room.
They frustratingly escape me.
The very small words- the ones I use for fillers (although naturally I try to avoid them) and probably the pronouns too- are giggling behind the legs of my desk, all crouched round together. They remind me of my boys when I announce that it is bedtime.
The others- the ones that make up the main sentences have decided that despite the frost, they are going to pack themselves a picnic and go off to the beach. I just watched them trail out the door and open the front gate, arguing about which one of them will carry the food.
As you can see, this morning is a lot.
You might assume that seeing as though I live in an out of the way place, that I cannot rely on my people to help me find a way through, but I would gleefully like to tell you that you’re mistaken. My people are everywhere.
Many of my people don’t even know that they’re my people. And what’s more, some of them are dead.
A little while back, I picked up a book about birds and exclaimed shortly after the first paragraph, into the thin air, ‘you are my people!’.
Last week, I stumbled upon a Portuguese illustrator whose enthusiasm and skill are second to none and I claimed him as my people too. In fact, I shot him to the top. He’s an excellent people to have.
In mornings such as these, I draw on my people quite a lot. I open the book or click play on the video and I let their energy magic into existence something in me that I can only describe as ‘possibility’.
I let them convince me that it’s possible to write or draw or make. Something. Anything.
Stop pissing around, they tell me affectionately. Just make something exist.
Our creative selves do not exist in isolation- nor are they meant to. We get to piggyback off the brilliant, artistic, wordy unicorns we’ve chosen for ourselves, who gift us with remembering things are possible simply by showing up themselves.
So, in case you need this too, in the most loving tone I can muster, please stop pissing around and make something.
There’s someone out there who needs to piggy back off you.
xx Jane
