Category: Blog

I’ve developed the habit of giving myself instructions before I go to sleep. I do the same when I’m about to set off walking. I take seriously the power of my unconscious brain, my collaboration with the mysterium, and I actively call them into work. For instance, today I told myself to think about creative safety.

Think about creative safety, I said (it’s true, I’m that direct). I wanted to dig into what it means to make things — writing things, drawing things, all the things — and send them out into the world.

How do we get to a place where it feels possible to do that joyously and frequently? Where we’re racing downhill, wind in our hair, feet travelling faster than our thoughts, words tumbling out beneath our fingers. Where we’re enlivened by this wild and crazy experience of creating, rather than tightened or reduced by it.

I had a whole series mapped out (on a Google Doc and everything) but as I walked and mused and chatted to myself, I realised that where I’d planned to start was actually halfway through. If we really want to understand our creative experience — the things that work, the things that hinder, the things that are sublime — then we need to understand the ground our creative shoots are rooted in.

Which, as it happens, is the body.

Before we dance with the emotions of creating; before we even tinker with a creative state of mind, we need to understand creativity as a system of movement. And while you might screw your nose up and wonder why that is, hang around for a moment because I’m about to tell you.

Your Nervous System Is A System Of Movement

Depending on your background and interests, you probably have at least a working understanding of your nervous system. I promise I’m going to do my best not to make this deathly dull, but even if the info feels a little dry, the ramifications of understanding it are transformative. So eat some chocolate while we do this and I swear it will be worthwhile.

Before we move on to the creative parts, there are a few important things you need to know.

You’ve probably heard the term fight or flight or sympathetic nervous system, and for the sake of what we’re talking about here, we’re going to reduce both to a single term: your survival nervous system.

Your survival nervous system is a system of reflex (this part is important). It’s designed to respond in highly predictable and efficient ways — a “when this happens, that will occur” kind of deal.

When your survival nervous system is activated, your body organises itself around one of a handful of options: fight, flight, freeze or collapse. That’s it. Each has its own structural template, a way the body arranges itself to defend, flee, prepare, or shut down.

On the flipside, your parasympathetic system is your mode of functioning when you’re at your most adaptive. As humans, we are relational beings, and our bodies literally change their physical arrangement to meet and match the environment. In this mode, there isn’t just one way to be (as there is in a reflex system), but multiple options that allow us to harmonise with our experience, tuning in, responding, adapting.

The most important thing I want you to understand here is that anytime we talk about the nervous systems above, we’re talking about movement expressions. Yes, emotional and behavioural experiences get grouped with these states (we’ll get to that later), but understanding the difference between your survival nervous system and your creative nervous system is vital. It lets you approach creative challenges from a completely new perspective.

Everything You Create Starts With A Movement Pattern

If you understand that your sympathetic (survival) and parasympathetic (creative) systems are systems of movement, then it follows that everything we do, movement-wise, is rooted in one of these two systems. The way you move is either embedded in your survival nervous system or your creative nervous system.

And yes — writing, drawing, painting and making are all movement.

What Decides Which System You Create From?

The primary influence is the learning state you were in when you began the practice. A sympathetic learning pattern usually forms when early conditions were built around rote learning and repetition — where there was only one acceptable pathway and it led to a single, expected outcome. In those environments, the body learns that action is something to “get right,” not something to explore.

Conversely, the creative nervous system develops through play-based learning. That doesn’t mean there was no outcome or intention, but the route to get there remained open. You might have had a starting point and a desired end point, but your brain and body were free to figure out how they wanted to organise themselves along the way.

So, What’s The Consequence Of Creating From Each System?

Remember, the survival nervous system is a system of reflex. Its entire function revolves around maximising your powers of force (fight), acceleration (flight), or hoarding/conservation (collapse).

If our creative patterns are rooted in this system, we are likely to find that:

• We are intensely outcome-driven, and may find ourselves getting tunnel-focused or “needing to get it right”
• We create rigid structures or pathways for ourselves
• We create with a “fix and conquer” energy and a harsh inner critic
• We feel the need to control the environment to feel ready to create
• The creative process feels exhausting, pressured, cramped or adversarial
• We embody urgency and pressure, or cycle into perfectionism, avoidance, self-doubt or collapse

We can absolutely be efficient and productive in this mode, but it has consequences, physically and emotionally, for our enjoyment, sustainability and longevity.

I’ve also wondered to myself if this, in part, is where the suffering artist trope comes from. That we may have built art education models based on outcome obsession and critique-based learning that fix us into a linear process and create closed-circuit survival loops. Not all the time, of course but, well… enough.

Conversely, operating from our parasympathetic, or creative nervous system, we are more likely to be:

• Curiosity-driven, with easier access to imagination
• Flexible and varied in the routes we take to achieve outcomes
• Able to match our energy to the circumstance
• Creatively collaborative in our outlook
• Naturally inclined to build sustainable practices over time
• Intelligent in how we use energy
• Able to see mistakes as interesting rather than catastrophic
• Lost in the process (in a good way)

And it’s important to remember: this is not a conversation about control or calm.

It’s a conversation about capacity and vitality.

How Do You Use This Knowledge When You’re Making Things?

If your creative blocks feel like a crystal ball, where you can predict the future in advance, then what you’ve identified is a survival reflex: a way of creating from your survival nervous system.

In this state, your thoughts will likely repeat themselves (you’ll find yourself spinning the same old narrative), and your body will be full of sensations you label as anxious, stuck, or frustrated (and every variation in between), all of which steer you toward a predictable outcome in how you feel and behave.

It’s not that we want to overlook the emotional component of the experience, but what I want to focus on today is the movement experience — what you can do from a body-based perspective to shake things up.

A side note here: you can have a dominant expression (e.g. “when I paint, I mostly create from my survival nervous system”), or you might slip into these experiences only occasionally. Regardless, what follows helps in both instances.

Let Me Give You A Personal Example

I experience different blocks in my writing compared to my visual art. Writing is something I’ve leaned heavily on in my life and have also put a lot of pressure on. For example, in my final high school exams, I predicted the questions in advance and pre-crafted my essays, writing them again and again until I could recite them by heart. A perfect example of sympathetic learning.

Consequently, I can easily flip into my survival nervous system when I write — if I get too outcome-focused, or I’m tired and feel pressure to produce, or I lose my playfulness.

So today, when I felt that familiar sensation in my body, I took myself walking. I recorded a series of voice notes as I walked and by the time I sat down, I had a clear sense of what I wanted to say, without the angst that might have been created if I’d forced myself to sit at the computer. I created from a different “movement” place and the entire experience was different.

Coming to visual art as an adult, I don’t have those same patterns. I’m much more free and playful because the ground I learned in was rooted in those qualities. But for the sake of example, if I felt the same tightness around drawing, I would approach things similarly. I could draw standing up instead of sitting. Hold my pencil differently. Let my whole body participate in the drawing.

I would look to change the movement of drawing first, and see if my emotions followed me.

Some Things For You To Consider: Interrupt The Reflex

A survival reflex depends on predictability; it needs the next step to be the same as the last. Changing anything in the movement pattern disrupts the physiological sequence that keeps you stuck. When you feel yourself slipping into the familiar groove, your job isn’t to bully yourself out of it. Your job is to disrupt the movement that feeds it.

Try:

• Shifting from sitting to standing (or the opposite)
• Holding your pen differently
• Switching materials
• Changing scale — go tiny, go enormous
• Moving locations
• Changing speed — deliberately fast, deliberately slow
• Introducing a new sensory input (music, texture, temperature)
• “Starting differently”. For instance, my writing today starting with me speaking words out loud. In doing so, I “hacked” the system that told me there was only one way to do this, and circled round the patterns that keep me stuck.

Once the body is no longer following the old motor program, the survival loop loses its footing. This is how you reintroduce adaptability.

Often one tiny interruption is enough to bring curiosity back online, enough to re-open possibility. That’s what we’re looking for: to let ourselves drop back into our creative brain.

What I Want You To Take From This Is Simple

You don’t have to solve all your creative challenges in your head.

You can meet them through movement.

You can work with the body you’re creating from.

And when you change the state beneath the art, the art — and the experience of making it — changes with you.

xx Jane

I love the idea that the opposite of anxiety is creativity. I muse on this a lot. I’ve been asking myself, what’s the opposite of perfectionism? Is it play? I think that’s certainly a part of it. Is it meaning? That belongs in there as well. But after many walks with the dogs, and talking with my horses, and chattering with all my lovely birds, I arrived at this:

The opposite of perfectionism is trust.

The thing about the nervous system is that it’s a reality-based machine. It relies on the recognition of truth. Truth can be a hard thing to handle because not everything we see, observe and live is lovely. Along with the glorious and beauteous and wondrous is the hard and the blistering and the brutal. A regulated nervous system, to my mind, is one that holds all these things and maintains the capacity for nuance. Where the edges of our skin grow to hold multiple perspectives and understandings. Where the desire remains for mutual flourishing, and amidst all of that we stay connected to our truth.

For as long as we meet the full force of reality and make choices involved to our own care, we’ll be ok. We’ll move with the flow of life instead of against it. This is not the same as things being easy or comfortable or even enjoyable, but it is congruent. It’s a life that has capacity for the full force of joys and sadnesses, where we listen to the voices of our inspirations and act on them. Where we meet life with a robust sense of self and what we’re capable of.

It’s a life where we stay connected to our own humanity.

Except, as we all know, there are times when that option is not there. Where it’s not as simple as “making choices” because those choices are impossible. Think childhood living situations where the circumstances are less than ideal, or where you find yourself thrust into inescapable and harmful situations not of your own design.

Even then, the nervous system remains benevolent. Our feeling tendrils designed to extend out into the world turn in on themselves. We call them back, those parts responsible for feeling, and where possible, turn them off. A loving act of the body where it decides, if choice is not available, and running away or fighting is not possible, then we shall turn in ourselves. We shall coil ourselves around our own heart and make our outsides a people-coloured human-skinned shell, enamelled for protection.

Do you want to hear something beautiful?

Your body, your very physicality, changes according to your nervous system state. Your heart drops from higher in your chest, down and further to the left. Your lungs shift position to fall and embrace the heart. Your rib cage, which in safety spread like wings, forms a protective case, clustering all your organs together in one place.

This is your body’s response to threat but it’s also deeply loving. Come closer, your heart calls, and your body dutifully follows. Your entire being trusts your heart.

Yesterday, someone wrote to me. They said they’d read my words about perfectionism, and what they felt in response was grief. At all the things they haven’t done. At all the things that their perfectionism got in the way of. And the possible future grief about what it might prevent them from doing moving forward.

And what this tells me is that they’ve lost their trust. Not just trust in the world (although I’m sure that’s absolutely true), but the bigger form of trust that’s in themselves.

I want to also add this:

If you grew up in a household where addiction or mental health challenges were part of your experience, you’ll recognize that your very survival depended on not acknowledging the truth. Sooner rather than later, you made an agreement of some sort not to see what was happening. That these eyes didn’t want to witness what they saw, that these ears were better blocked, and that this heart was much safer tucked away. And so you lived inside a story—a collaboration between body and mind designed to keep you in one piece, to keep you as the okay-est version of yourself that was possible in the life you found yourself living at that time.

A lack of acknowledging reality that was useful and necessary and very, very kind.

That is, until we find ourselves in different circumstances and that story is no longer all that worthwhile.

I’ve been thinking about this very hard, because I care and I understand this deeply and I also know that so much of what is life reducing and demeaning and the things (and sorry for my frankness) that make us feel like shit are often so unnecessary. At least in the place we find ourselves living now.

But how do we Get It? I mean, we can get it up here **taps self on the head** but how do we feel it? How do we embody that type of risk, take that kind of action that helps us create something bright and new? Which could be a picture, or an essay, a painting. Or perhaps a whole new life.

I think it starts with grief and if we’re lucky, it sizzles into anger and then quickly becomes boredom. And then, acceptance and then love.

I also think talking about all this stuff is so important. What I love most about my treasured friends is that we are all a little crazy, but on a good run, we’re all crazy on different days. Which means that the non-crazy one gets to lead, and we can all bow to their wisdom, and then one at a time, we take turns in thinking we have it all together, until the scripts flips and it’s our turn to be slightly bonkers the next week.

I’ll try and be the non-crazy one today, but let me tell you, I have my moments. God, do I have my moments. I’d go into them in detail, but the people that tell you how to write these sorts of things tell you people who read these sort of things don’t want more than a thousand words and I fear we’ve already gone well over.

So, from the bottom of my weird, crazy little heart, I’m going to tell you: I think your grief is good. Swear at me through the screen if you must, but I’m just going to talk louder and louder. To me, it shows your compass points are turning towards the truth and now your body trusts that you can feel it.

I imagine it’s saying something like:

Look, we don’t have that much time. And you’re really bloody fabulous. And there’s all these things that we haven’t done which aren’t your fault and yes it sucks but screw it, shall we do something different moving forward? Mix things up a bit?

It’s trying to drag you onto the dance floor but you’re insisting that your place is behind the biscuits.

It adds a certain spice to your insides we might call fear, specifically, one of the worst fears we have: the fear that we’ll keep doing the very thing we can now see has stopped us and is no longer working.

I’m going to go off script here and it feels wild and dangerous and slightly naughty and would make all my mentors roll over in their beds (I was going to say graves before I reminded myself they’re still living), who have all taught me very smart things about the body and patterns and how to negotiate such things, but my intuition tells me this:

You have to find out where your laugh has gone. You have to get your smile back. You must treat it like the personal emergency that it absolutely is.

I’ve joked with my friends about starting a podcast called Delete My WhatsApp Upon Death for this very reason. We often talk about the Very Important, Very Serious, Very Adult things that happen in life in the context of such dark jokes that if a stranger were to read them, we’d probably get cancelled (from what, I’m not sure—this is me wildly overrating my own importance), but you know what I mean.

I know that the second I lose my jokes and my smile disappears the situation has become dire. And even if nothing about my circumstances has changed, if I can laugh about it, something in me has lightened. A situation that once felt immovable opens up the smallest crack. A tiny space where joy can leak back in. And where I’ve opened just enough myself to let it find me.

We have to figure out a way to take the situation seriously whilst holding ourselves lightly.

So if I were you, I would put myself on a diet of joy. I would list all the things that make me smile, that are possible right now, and ask myself how often I am doing them. And then I would do at least two of them every, single day.

If I find myself hiding away, I would remind myself to keep on showing up. To put myself in caring places with the people who most get me. Where I can laugh and cry and might be slightly snotty. Where I get to have my crazy week, my crazy minute, and probably because I’m real and let myself express those crazy moments, when I’m in the company of someone else experiencing the same, I’ll find I have something to offer, something that’s really worthwhile.

And I will start to really pay attention: to the reality of this moment. To the times when my mind is a dangerous neighbourhood, and I will invite others in there with me. My friends. Podcasts or audiobooks of people saying the things I think my brain needs to hear.

I will commit to this kind of nauseating, radical self-love (isn’t it a strange thing to remind ourselves of this, to love ourselves?), and notice how much energy it takes to do the opposite. That it’s like holding your foot over a geyser.

I will understand that all this will probably not be instant. That it’s not something that can be forced. That it’s like sleep. That I have to be in bed, lying down. I have to allow sleep to happen. And if it doesn’t, then for a little while, I’ll do something different, but that is conducive to sleep occurring.

I think joy is like this. And that creativity is much the same.

If trust is the opposite of perfectionism, then we have to trust our curiosities. We can do so tentatively at first. We’re allowed to approach with trepidation. We have to prove ourselves trustable- but only to ourselves.

I don’t know how to end this in a way that doesn’t feel saccharine and predictable but if I was sitting around the table with you now, I’d probably just say, shall we have a cup of tea now? Herbal or regular? Want to hear a terrible joke that I really love? What has five toes but isn’t your foot?

xx Jane

A few days ago, I had a good wail about perfectionism and how it can turn us into human turnips. I wrote that piece because I’d read an article where perfectionism was framed as something cutesy with a Hello Kitty vibe. A kind of hands-in-the-air rally cry for the perpetually-trying-to-be-perfect, as though waggling your finger and telling someone to loosen up would be enough to encourage them to pull on their roller skates, let their hair down, and get over themselves. Or something like that.

It felt important to say that if you struggle with perfectionism, it’s not your fault. It’s part of a system of control we’re trained into. And even though this is unfair, and sucks, and we should all sit around drinking coffee and gesticulating wildly about what a load of rollicking bollocks it is (side note: I would like that very much. Call me.), we can’t escape the fact that if we find ourselves afflicted by the perfectionism gremlins, it’s our responsibility to shake them off. We have to take our own hands and lead ourselves to the other side.

And don’t think I’m telling you this from theory—I’ve cross-trained in the highest form of energy a body can produce without chemical assistance: perfectionism and panic combined. And despite those things, if there’s something I’d happily toot my own horn about, it’s that I am a pro-level action taker. I’m really, really good at getting things done. If I’m inspired, have an idea, or want to do something, I’m doing it as soon as yesterday. I believe I can do it, and if I can’t yet, I’m convinced there’s a way. I don’t know where this self-belief came from, but I’m grateful to her.

Action, I’m convinced, is the elixir. An astonishing, repetitive, mildly nauseating dedication to literally doing The Thing. It’s really as simple (and as complicated) as that.

With that in mind, let’s adventure on. If we were to summarise the “problem of perfectionism” in a creative sense into a single point, it would be this:

Perfectionism, in practice, is either a problem of starting or a problem of finishing.

Let’s look at both.

The Problem of Starting

Perfectionism is a starting problem because that glistening idea in your brain never seems to materialise the way you want it to when it lands on the page. Somewhere between your head and the paper (or the computer, or whatever your chosen surface), it gets stuck at the traffic lights on a highway that’s always under construction.

You find yourself deleting more words than you write, erasing more lines than you draw, and wallowing in a frustration that soon feels too big for your skin to contain.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you to “focus on the process” or “not worry about making something good,” because that kind of advice will just make you want to hurt me.

Instead, I’m going to tell you this:

Focus On Quantity Instead Of Quality

We’re going to shift the compass slightly. Instead of aiming for the perfect paragraph or the drawing that turns out exactly the way you imagined, you’re going to give yourself a quantity goal. You’re going to commit to loads of art.

A drawing a day. A thousand words a session. Whatever fits your form of expression.

We need to keep the gremlins busy but distract them with new goals. And weirdly enough, if we can do that, keep an open mind to learning, and pick up some skills along the way, the quality starts to take care of itself.

The Problem of Finishing

Now we get to the other end of the spectrum: finishing.

If you’ve spent time on a piece or project and find yourself swimming in the sea of “just one more thing”—one more edit, tweak, or stroke of paint—you’re going to have to give yourself a deadline and decide when it’s enough.

Too many unfinished things eat us alive. There’s a liberation in ending.

We leave things open and undone as a “just in case” policy. In case we can make it better. In case we think of a different way to end it.

But end it you must. Draw a line in the sand and finish The Thing.

I’m actually quite obsessed with this idea of finishing energy. I’ve noticed how many half-done things linger in my mind and how consuming they are—how they create a particular kind of fatigue from holding so many things “open.”

And when we think of finishing, it’s important not just to think of bigger projects, but to commit to acts of finishing every day. To become heroic micro-finishers, dedicated to mindscapes like open pastures and forests rather than battery chicken farms.

Following Your Own Instructions (Otherwise Known As Exporting Your Perfectionism)

What you’ll be left with now is a conversation with your body. When you sit down to do The Thing—or finish The Thing—and your perfectionism gremlins get activated, it’s going to show up in your body in a very specific way. One you’ll recognise.

“Ahh,” you’ll say. “Here we go again.”

That feeling will be seductive, so take this as your warning. It will try to convince you to discard everything we’ve talked about and return to your familiar patterns. There will be comfort in that—not because it’s what’s best for you, but because it’s what’s known.

So here’s what you must do:

Decide on your quantity goal, and decide in advance what “enough” will be. Decide when you will finish.

Be humane with yourself. These goals are not for beating yourself up—they’re scaffolds to help you create something new.

Write them down, and then follow your own instructions. Outsource your brain to your written list. Ride shotgun with the gremlins if you must (and you probably will). Pause. Take a break if you need to. But then get going.

Just go and do The Thing.

And you know what else?

You don’t need to be brilliant.

A friend said this to me when I confessed I wanted to write more about the nervous system and creativity but was afraid of being morbidly boring—of slipping into the lingo of my training in a way that wasn’t useful.

I don’t need to be brilliant. But I do need to show up and do the work.

And if that remains our key directive, the beauty is that—in whatever way it fits into our own lives—it’s something we can all absolutely do.

To your glorious, imperfect selves,

xx Jane

PS. I’m serious about the coffee.

I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do. This will be a total waste of your time. You should probably get up and leave now. It’s useless. You can’t say I haven’t tried.

I’ve taken The Words for a walk and instructed whatever part of my brain is responsible for finding them to listen up:

I’m going walking, I say. You should think about perfectionism. You’ve got an hour. Then, we will write.

Between me and The Words are multiple cups of now-cold, undrunk tea. I’m stuck somewhere between wanting to escape—run, do anything, go anywhere other than here—and feeling like I’m moving in slow motion. I end up doing neither, suspended in a place of no-motion.

I’ve cried. Can you believe that? Actually cried. Over what, I’m not exactly sure. My cheeks are hot, and I’ve distracted myself a million times. I do have Words: These Words, Those Words, All The Fucking Words crawling out through the spaces in my skin but they aren’t the ones I want. They’re never The Right Words.

I know this beast. And she’s eating me alive.

I watched a student of mine the other day, sitting in the corner, trying to draw a bird. She has three degrees, she tells me, and one of them is art. The second is design, because the art never turned out the way she wanted it to. The third is economics because, well, she needed to make a living. So it goes.

Now she’s here, drawing a bird—and her bird is good, excellent in fact—and she’s convinced she cannot do it. That it’s no good. This, she declares, is why she doesn’t draw much. It never comes out the way she wants it to. It just never works out on the page.

I feel the gripping of her insides in my own and cannot stand it.

I had something different for you—a whole finished piece about perfectionism that was quite neat and nice—but I thought about my bird-drawing-art-person-friend with three degrees and I knew it wasn’t right. It wasn’t truthful in the way it needed to be. It wasn’t a conversation about aliveness, which is what this is. So, let’s be truthful, shall we?

My perfectionism may be something I’ll never be quite rid of. She rises like the hunger that she is, catches me off guard and then consumes me. I’d love to tell you I’m graceful in those moments, but that would be a lie—and we’ve already agreed not to tell lies. I might be wiping tears away, grit spitting out between my teeth but I am fierce. I claw and scratch and let my face distend. I’m not interested in niceties or politeness, in beautiful words or the right phrases. Perfectionism is a life-reducing tyrant, and I’m in this to survive.

There’s nothing natural about perfectionism, this I know. It’s not a personal quirk; it’s a learned mechanism of control that keeps us small, compliant, and endlessly self-correcting. It’s internalised oppression dressed up as self-improvement. It’s what happens when the systems we live in—patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, ableism—convince us that our worth is conditional on performance, productivity, and presentation. So we absorb those values into our nervous systems and call them “standards.”

Perfectionism becomes oppression when our own nervous system becomes the enforcer. We start policing ourselves. The inner critic is the coloniser within the psyche, an internalised voice of the systems that reward suppression and control over authenticity and spontaneity.*

I think of the words of Anne Lamott :

“How alive am I willing to be?” And if you’re willing to be really alive, then you’ve got to write your truth. You’ve got to tell your stories. You’ve got to do this deep union with self, or you have to ask yourself, “Why am I even here? What’s the point?”

And while I want to tell you some things that have helped me that are more practical and mundane, I’ll start with the most necessary of all: a healthy dose of fire. A fire that reminds me I will not be taken down. That I will not succumb to those voices. That I will use mine to spark the flame in others too. That I will write all the words, my words, all the wrong and clunky and terrible words when the beautiful ones elude me and I will draw all the lines that are not quite right or in the wrong places, or upside down, all the birds that don’t look like birds.

And what’s more I’ll be gleeful. And I will do it loudly, and joyfully and (ir)reverently and I will do it over, and over and over and over and over.

And you will join me and we’ll eat cookies, and drop the crumbs over the floor, and we will grab pencils and make big marks across the sky and we’ll remind ourselves of this full bodied dance that is creating.

Because we are a human, doing the things that humans do.

Making and creating. Wildly, freely, frequently.

To accept anything different is the lie.

xx Jane

*Attribution Note:

These ideas sit within a broad lineage of feminist, anti-capitalist, and trauma-informed thought that understands perfectionism not as a personal failing but as a learned system of control. Writers such as Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Anne Lamott, Brené Brown, Sonya Renee Taylor, Tricia Hersey, and Resmaa Menakem have all, in different ways, explored how domination-based cultures teach us to internalise surveillance, self-correction, and worthiness through performance.

The phrasing here is my own synthesis, but the roots of it are collective, drawn from a long conversation about how systems of patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, and capitalism shape our nervous systems and our sense of worth.

So here’s the question:

“I used to paint and enjoyed how time passed unnoticed while I was daubing away. But for some reason I stopped, and now it’s been years and I simply don’t know how to start again—or if I even want to paint at all. I do want to make messes of some sort, though!”

I feel it’s necessary to start with a little celebration.

I’m objectively a terrible dancer—no shade to self intended, it’s just the truth. I have a window of about ten seconds where I use up all my moves and then end up involved in some complicated swaying. But right now, I’m dedicating that full ten seconds just to you.

Because I think it’s important to remember there are two types of problems.

Problems that are, in fact, problems.

And the other sort, which are what we might call Very Good Problems To Have.

And this problem—the one that asks how we might use our creative energy again, even when we’re not sure how or in what form—is A Most Excellent, Very Good Problem To Have.

So let’s start there. With the enthusiastic embrace of this excellent problem. It allows us to proceed with a different sort of lightness.

Now, we can become creative sleuths.

The Problem of Inaction

We can probably agree that the solution to wondering where to start is just to start anywhere. You just have to begin.

That looks very good on paper and makes perfect sense when written down but for some strange and mysterious reason, it’s not that easy in Real Life.

One of the key parts of The Problem is this:

We think that if we just think about it long enough, eventually we’ll arrive at The Best Place To Start. That we can think our way to the Best Beginning.

This isn’t entirely our fault. We live in a world that loves to analyse and to question, and we’ve become skilled in overthinking and underdoing as a result.

But the key really is to do something—anything—to begin. That something may not be what you end up doing regularly or devoting yourself to, but it’s a Necessary Something to get to the thing that is.

Your brain is dedicated to all things practical. It only knows the next step it wants to take when it can observe something real—something it can see, smell, taste, or touch.

Then it’s able to assess and decide where to go next: whether to continue, to tweak, or to abandon.

The key is not to stay in your head too long. Sooner rather than later, you need to commit to making something—anything—real. It’s the only way to find out what happens next.

Once you’ve realised that “do anything” is the first step to starting again, we can move to the next one.

You have to let yourself have the experience of starting again

It might sound ridiculous, but it’s true. You haven’t done this for a while, given yourself time for your creativity. To be creative is to step into the unknown.

Take your whole self with you. Let yourself be in this place, the place of a person figuring it out and starting again.

Don’t be surprised by what comes up when you meet yourself there: that it feels strange or clunky, that you’re not sure what you’re doing, that you feel frustrated.

Of course you do—you haven’t been here for a while. Don’t let those feelings convince you you’re doing something wrong.

Here’s another thing that’s helpful to know:

Writing, drawing, painting (literally anything) is a movement pattern (at least from the perspective of your nervous system and brain), just like riding a bike, surfing, or running.

If you haven’t done those things for a while, you don’t expect to be a pro straight away. You might laugh at your lack of coordination, but you also understand the only way to get better is to keep going. That it just might take some time.

Creating of any sort is the same, we just come at it with a much more rigid perspective. We somehow think about it differently. But essentially, it’s identical. You have to grease those neural pathways, drop yourself into your creative brain (even if it takes a while to find it).

You have to give yourself enough grace to have the experience of starting again.

Where to start?

With whatever piques your curiosity.

If you look at something and think, I’d love to be able to do that, or that looks fun, start there.

You don’t have to be brilliant (a friend said this to me recently and I found it incredibly liberating).

Follow Your Curiosity Into Action

I’ve become a little bit obsessed with following my natural curiosities into action as and when the impulse arises (or as close to), instead of deferring it to some point in the future.

We’re trained from a young age to follow schedules that tell us when to eat, move, and rest. Over time, we become schedule-led instead of body-led, and then we wonder why we feel disconnected from our instincts in other areas of life.

The same pattern shows up in our creative lives. We think it would be better to wait until we have a big chunk of time, the perfect setup, or a fully formed plan—hello, control patterns and perfectionist tendencies—but what if we stopped waiting for the conditions to be ideal?

If you feel that spark of curiosity or movement inside you, act in service of the impulse, even in the smallest way. Don’t wait for the future to make it easier. It rarely does.

And if you can’t act in that moment, at least notice it. Then, as soon as you can, make a movement in that direction.

Hang Out With People Who Do The Thing You Want To Do

There are two things we’re missing, as human people in this world:

First, communities of makers who normalise that making art is a necessary and important thing to do.

And second, places that help us take action—that help us translate longing or ideas into actually sitting down and doing the thing.

I have a creative membership called Creating Wild that focuses on exactly this, so I can speak from experience: it is transformative.

I’m not saying join my thing (although you’re absolutely welcome to). What I am saying is: find your people. Hunt them down with creative ferocity, in whatever way is available to you. You’ll be thankful when you do.

If I could pull you aside now and offer some parting words, they would be these:

That inkling you have—that thought about painting again, or creating again—it means something. It counts for something.

Let yourself follow it, and trust that you already have enough within you to figure it out as you go.

So start where you are. With the tools you have, the time you have, and the curiosity that have realised never left you. That’s all you need to begin again.

Happy creating!

xx Jane

Before we get started, you should know that I have a pathological fear of being boring. Flaccid is another word I also never want anywhere near my name (even just writing it makes me screw my nose up). And alongside them, I’m going to throw in apathetic, that chronic Feeling of Blah Blah Blah.

It’s not that I’ve never dealt with the Blah Blahs. Of course I have. It’s part of being human. But working with so many people navigating very grown-up things like “regulated nervous systems” (or the quest for one), I see more fabulous souls than I’d like struck down with cases of the Creative Blah-Blahs when they need not be.

And being so resistant to the condition myself, if you identify with The Blahs in any way (or, in fact, feel that way right now), I feel it’s my duty to perkily—and possibly somewhat irritatingly—see if we can’t navigate our way out of it together. I can also use everything that follows as a note to self.

I mean, who cares? Why does it even matter?

So, we’re here are we? Nursing those old chestnuts. I didn’t want to use the example I’m about to for the simple reason that I personally never get sick of drawing birds but seeing it’s the first thing that popped into my head, we’re going to run with it. A cosmic joke, if you will.

Let’s say you’re on a quest to draw more birds (but it could just as easily be writing a book, making more art—insert your thing here). You’re sitting down at the table. There’s a million things you should, could, and don’t want to be doing. Work to be done. Messes to be tidied. All the many things clawing at your attention.

And even though you don’t actually want to be doing those things—you do, weirdly, want to be here drawing birds—you still find yourself wondering what the hell you’re actually doing.

You look down at your paper and convince yourself it’s crap. I mean, it’s actually kind of embarrassing that you’re doing this at all. In what universe did this seem like a good idea? It’s not like you’re ever going to sell them, and even if you wanted to, you’d probably make no money.

You’re pretty sure you’re not good at it—I mean, look at it—and anyone who tells you differently is probably just being kind. God, what’s actually the point?

Well, I’m so glad that you asked. This is the perfect question to pick up on:

What really IS the point?

I can’t assume to know what the point is for you (although I have an inkling), but I want you to sit with this question for a moment. Just watch your tone—the emphasis you use will change how you answer it completely.

What I can tell you is what the point is for me: without art-making, I am bonkers. Without art-making, I am sad. Without art-making, I am irritable and grumpy and feel like I have things (I don’t know what things exactly—things) wanting to escape out through my skin.

And while we’re on the subject, I also believe that art-making is not an indulgence or a luxury or even something you squeeze in. It’s a function of wellbeing. We are wired to make things. It’s one of the essential considerations of health that needs to be nailed back on the chart alongside your five-a-day and ten thousand steps.

If you consider yourself a creative human (and I’ll assume you do, because, well, here you are), you’ll know that creative energy needs to be metabolised. It has its own urgency and persistence; it doesn’t just disappear.

It has to go somewhere. It wants to turn into something. It needs to move through you.

And if it’s ignored, dishonoured, or disrespected, it doesn’t just evaporate—it comes at you sideways. As resentment. As irritation. As anger.

The long and the short of it? Best sit down and draw that bird.

So, what’s the way in?

Ok, we’ve arrived at a good point. We’ve decided that creating is important and the Blahs are boring and we’d quite like to feel something different.

There are two roads we can take. We can start in the Human Head Area and consider how our thinking might be a co-conspirator in the Blah Blahs, or we can look to this feisty animal body of ours and work out how to twiddle the gears a bit.

Let’s start in the human head area and work our way down.

Human Head Business & The Blahs

All thoughts are a conversation with gravity.

That might sound weird, but if you’re curious, stick with me.

I don’t know if thoughts can exist separate from a body, but if they can, I imagine they’re very hard to catch. We know what someone is thinking not because we can read their mind, but because we can read their body.

We understand that what we’re thinking about—and how we’re thinking about it—shows up as a physical imprint.

Thoughts come to life through a specific arrangement of our insides, and that arrangement means we feel specific things. It’s a co-dependency we’ll never escape from (well, not without the breathing bit at least).

Creative Blah energy, if we were to consider it through a nervous system lens, is a very collapse-ey energy. It doesn’t want to fight. It doesn’t want to run away from anyone. It just wants to sit around like a human puddle and think about how hard done by it feels right now and how it wishes things were different.

I mean, I don’t love saying it but it can be a bit victim-ey. A bit martyr-ey, if I’m honest.

Try it on for size. If you let yourself languish in “who even cares” energy for too long, you will find that gravity starts to tear you down. Your bones start collapsing under the weight of their own despair. Your skin acts like it’s melting off you. Your footsteps are heavy, clunking like a chamber maid in the 1800’s.

I can describe this because I know this feeling, too. We’ve all been there.

What I feel like when I get into these types of moods is there is an undercurrent of disappointment. Is it entitlement? I think it probably is. My mind is tricking me into thinking that on some level, I want something that is not available to me right now and that makes me feel a little cross.

I guess, embarrassingly, I might even think I’m owed something by an unknown someone- recognition perhaps- in return for all this work I’m putting in.

That life is supposed to work to the equation of hard work = work worth doing, work that is validated.

That if I care about it enough, then you should care about it too. That kind of thing.

Christ on a bike. Just writing it down is making me depressed.

The antidote? In the words of every 80’s pop star worth their leotard sponsorship, you’ve got to take the power back.

It’s true what you’re thinking (sorry): people might not care. You might not ever make the money you want (sorry again). The world is not always fair. It does, occasionally, suck balls.

(I feel the urge to write an alternate ending where everyone cares and you’re so stinking rich it’s nauseating—which is just as possible as the former. Well, perhaps not everyone).

But entertaining all possibilities, the Blah Blahs need you to figure why you do it for you.

What do you want from your art?

And they want you to recognise the importance of your art-making, even if the motivating factor is as simple as helping you keep your shit together and feel slightly less annoyed. Which, by the way, is quite a big deal in my book.

Although, I’d love to think it makes you feel more joyful.

Your Body & The Blahs

Let’s think now about the physicality of apathy. It has bottom-of-the-pond energy. You know the feeling—when you step into slightly murky water, hit that soft, squidgy layer of silt, and recoil immediately because, ugh. That’s what this is. You’re stuck at the bottom of the pond.

Fortunately, movement is magical—and it doesn’t need to be much. But let’s not reduce ourselves to silt. You, my friend, are not bottom-of-the-pond—you’re a bottle full of liquid glitter. You just need to shake that glitter around.

But you must be careful— Blah Blah energy is seductive. It’ll tell you not to move, that movement is impossible. I’m afraid you’ll need to give yourself a little shove (or get someone nearby to do it for you). But you need to move. Move in ways that are unexpected. Move differently. Make your body think. Make it wake up.

Do whatever you need to—but move. You need to redistribute that glitter.

A Small Experiment

Let’s tie this up in a neat little package, shall we? Finish the loop, as I often hear mentioned on Important Podcasts.

1. Ask yourself, Why are you doing this? Beyond everything out there. Because you want to is enough. It doesn’t have to be anything bigger than that. Our views around artistic permission are so strange. We convince ourselves if we aren’t making money or receiving rave reviews our art lacks validity and therefore we shouldn’t do it. That’s rubbish. Figure out what it means for you. End of.

2. Move. We are creatures of movement who find ourselves (more often than not) in a sedentary world. Novel movement reactivates your sensory system and helps pull you out of ground hog day patterns. You literally and metaphorically need to shake things up.

3. Commit to something highly practical. The brain loves functional process (it loathes being stranded on The Island of Overthinking) . Anything to far off the practical and functional can cause us to behave in wonky ways. Don’t worry if it’s good or bad, right or wrong. Focus on something technical, something learnable, something doable. And see what’s possible from there.

I’d love to hear your thoughts- what helps you navigate the Blah Blahs?

xx Jane

PS. A side note: If you are really chronically blah, it can legitimately mean that you’re exhausted. This is not the type of blah I’m meaning here- the one I am speaking to is more existential. There’s no cure for exhaustion but good sleep.

I mean, let’s say hypothetically it’s Friday morning. Your head is feeling like scrambled eggs because you were up tending to global affairs with only two hours sleep, or because you were partying like it’s 1969, or in fact your teenage-something had a mini meltdown, combined with perimenopause fog detritus means that you have only a vague idea what your name is (I’ve purposely left this open ended so you have no idea which is me). You are aware that there are a mountain of things to be done, and you’d quite like to be placed in a sensory deprivation tank, possibly only drawing birds, but the world keeps prodding your pre-frontal cortex saying there are things that definitely need to get done.

At times like this, my friends, it’s important to hand over your executive function to other beings. And the being in my life right now is a great long list. And for an extra shot of dopamine, I recommend adding check boxes beside them so you can tick things off.

There’s nothing that will make a hormonal, feeling-like-the-bottom-of-a-pond-creature more accomplished than being able to add a big fat tick next to a thing that just got done.

 

Writing stuff down is, indeed, a magical thing. Those in the writing business know that we frequently understand ourselves better after, not before, the pen hits the page. That the purpose is not to arrive with the answers, but with all the many questions, and to hope, in some way, that we will scribe our way to the answers.

 

Lists are, perhaps, the most unromantic of all forms of writing, but they can still be a bloody good time. If you can’t be trusted to be left to your own devices for that day (week, month) then let a list take that gelatinous matter that used to be your brain and help you direct it usefully.

 

It helps you prioritise, reduce the overwhelm of all that bigness into tiny pockets of doable smallness, and stops you wondering about all the things you’ve forgotten while you sit around doing nothing.

 

It’s an exercise in simplification. In recognising the reality of where you are today, and turning the fuzz into action things. And the brain does love a bit of purpose. It’s entirely functional in its design. It hates it when you or I just stay up there, caught in overthinking.

 

So if that’s you (saving the world / hungover / caught in a hormonal rampage), may I suggest you make yourself a list. Take away the decision fatigue of your day and just tick off what needs to be done.

 

Sometimes, the things that are the most mundane will bring the most relief.

 

Last night’s beginning “Birds that visited my feeder” drawing, to keep me focused and less irritable at the kitchen table.

When I was very young, I had a best friend named Carly, and she had a budgie named Roger, a little parakeet of yellow and gold, who lived in a very small cage. Roger was, as they say, born in captivity, so his sense of the world was equally small. And because it was the 80s, our understanding of what a bird (or any animal, really) might need was apparently quite small also.

Both being young, we thought loving Roger meant giving him his seed on time, cleaning out his cage, and pressing our probably-grubby-still-growing noses between the bars to tell him all about our day.

And perhaps, at that moment, Roger thought that was what freedom was too.

That all air was tinged with the faint smell of disinfectant, that wings only flapped for two seconds at a time, and that preening yourself was the most interesting part of a 24 hour cycle.

One fateful afternoon, Roger’s cage was sitting on the back deck when the weather turned windy. You can probably guess what happened next—we both watched it unfold in slow motion. The cage tipped over, the small door popped open on its way down, and Roger just sat there, stunned, staring at this opening with no hands to hold him back.

After what felt like forever, Roger moved toward the door and flew away.

Out into that wild, vast world.

Carly and I were devastated (I felt he was my bird as much as hers), but at the same time, we understood (or at least hoped) that maybe Roger was happier. Our tiny selves did have some understanding, after all, that birds were meant for bigger things than cages.

Can you imagine what that must have felt like? For Roger I mean?

Holy crap, I imagine him saying. This is wild! One can only hope he didn’t go completely off the rails.

I really hope he found his happy ending.

I wonder if he thought about a different form of freedom, or if he really thought there was none.

We do this all the time, us humans- convince ourselves of only one type of freedom.

This morning as I sat down to write. I was tired, grumpy even, and my brain felt completely devoid of inspiration. And when you get to that point, your mind can convince you that you’re in a little cage, where you play the same patterns, where you keep placing your attention on things which are upsetting and disturbing that keep you spinning around in the same old cycles of thought.

I don’t have a lot for you today, but the one thing I can share is that I do know it’s possible to open the door up of the cage.

That there are always different realities available to us than the one that feels the most present or familiar.

You can start by reminding yourself that there’s no need to be impressive. That you just need to do something, anything, to pull you out of the spin cycle and drop you back into your creative heart, your creative brain.

So I write. Badly and not that interestingly, but nonetheless with good intention.

I draw shapes that make no sense. I draw a lot of bad birds.

I talk to people doing interesting things, let myself ride the winds of their creative energy.

I talk to my mountain parrots who visit me and tell them I’ll fill up the nectar feeder soon.

They aren’t massive things, but they are reminders:

That we aren’t in a cage.

That we don’t belong to the abyss of bad news, no matter how much of it we’re fed.

And that what we make doesn’t have to be good.

That the fact we have mind to make it all it sometimes the only liberation that we need.

A drawing / painting from this week for you xx

Sprinting when you are designed to walk…

I talked yesterday about seeking out more and more activities (art! all the making things!) that see you moving at a human pace, and today I thought I would share something super simple that helps you experience that in real time in a really practical way.

You’ll just need a pen, paper and 30 seconds.

Happy tinkering!

xx Jane

 

Ok, so the first part is about avoiding maths…

But the second part is something I’ve recently become a little bit obsessed with: moving at a human pace.

So much of what we’re asked to do, and where we place our attention, has us moving out of sync with ourselves.

Phones have us absorbing information faster than we can assimilate it.

The culture we’re part of asks for outputs that don’t match our natural rhythms.

A lot of us are feeling a bit scrambled, out of sync, and (frankly) exhausted, all the stuff and all the things leaving us scattered mentally, physically, and emotionally.

Which is why making stuff — making all the lovely things — matters so much. Not just for the obvious reasons (paint all the birbs! Draw all the birbs!), but because it actually allows you to catch up with yourself.

It gathers all your scattered pieces and arranges them into something you recognise.

So if you’re looking for a reason to sit down this weekend and make some art, I can’t think of a better one than that.

Happy mark-making, my friends.

xx Jane