Category: Blog

I listened to an interview recently where the interviewee was asked, if you had an hour every day to create, how would you design it?

I loved this, so I asked it of myself. And then, I asked it of the people that I work with. And whilst you might be thinking, an hour a day! The luxury! The glory! …an enthusiastic gallop towards such creative windows is not always the response that you will get.

After all, there’s a whole landscape of a life to consider before we arrive at such hours in our day. And weirdly and perplexingly, ‘time available to create’ does not necessarily equal ‘time used to create’. As it turns out, they aren’t the same thing at all.

What follows is for those of us who have the time- even if we’re talking minutes and not hours- but for whatever reason, find ourselves not using it the way that we intend to or would like.

And for those of us like me: who have children and work and caregiving roles which assume a constancy of interruption. Lately, for my mindset to be at all useful to my creative endeavours, I’ve had to rally against the rules of “deep work”- You need 90 minutes! Even one distraction will take you 20 mins to recover from!- because if I waited for those types of circumstances to be available to me, I would be getting nothing done. I mean, I’ve been interrupted twice before I got to the end of this sentence.

Which makes me curious about questions such as these:

What makes us able to access our creative minds as easefully and swiftly as possible, perhaps even on cue?

What expedites the transition out of ‘the everyday’ and into ‘creative work’?

How do we become creative ninjas, grabbing hold of those moments for all we are worth and riding that unicorn across the landscape of our most glistening creative intentions?

It seems to get to the place where we can sink into our creative time, we need to look at the many and varied reasons we argue against it. All the things that are truly getting in the way.

I’ll start with three of the top creative suspects.

Scenario One: You have time, but you fritter it away

This one is exactly what it says on the box. Perhaps you have the intentions to create, but when the time comes you end up scrolling / cleaning / organizing and basically doing anything but the thing you intended to do. Which then creates this wonderful loop of not only not doing the thing that you really wanted to do but feeling really crap about not doing the thing that you wanted to do.

If this is a pattern that’s consistent, you’ll find yourself left with prime fodder for an existential crisis about whether you’ve been kidding yourself that you are actually a creative person at all.

Scenario Two: You feel physically blocked, and it stops you doing your work

We aren’t speaking metaphorically here. In these instances, there’s something that comes up in your physical body that feels so restrictive and controlling that it stops you doing whatever it is you want to do. In my experience, having had many conversations about the bodily experience of creating, whenever someone describes it as an actual physical block (as opposed to a different feeling or sensation) it’s almost always perfectionism we’re dealing with.

Scenario Three: You’re caught in a permission leak or responsibility crisis

You really, really want to create. Like really, really. But it feels like there are more important things that you should do. Which is usually involved to doing something for someone else. Or something mundane, like housework. That on some level, for some unknown reason known to the entire spectrum of humanity except apparently you in that moment, feel like they’re more important. They’re not of course, but in this moment the idea of giving yourself time to create feels like a selfish thing to do.

So bearing all these in mind, what’s the prescription?

If I were Dr Creative, what’s the plan I would design for you to pull you out of your creative conundrum and help you manifest your creative dreams, or at least tinker away at them for the minutes or the hours that you have?

I’m so glad you asked!

✏️ Meet Yourself Where You’re At

Here’s the thing: You have to find a way in. You have to find a beginning point that meets you where you’re at so you can lead yourself into the creative experience that you want to have.

This doesn’t mean that you have to veer off track from the work that you intend or want to do, but what you’re looking for is a portal that allows you to alchemize the energy and direct it into something more creatively useful, so you can take advantage of the time that you have. And what that requires is a balancing of forces.

Let’s say you arrive to your hour, zingey and frazzled and perhaps a little anxious. That there is energy that really needs to move. You might shake up and down for a minute on the spot, and then allow yourself to walk and pace, speaking your words out loud if you have to (you can even voice record them). Don’t deny your experience; just meet it. And then seduce it in something that is more conducive to what you are trying to create.

Drawing spirals or blind contour drawing is great for this. Start by drawing a big, fast, crazy spiral and then as you wind in (or out) start to slow it down. And then speed it up, and slow it down again. Start where you are but play with the energetic experience until you have something more shapeable and workable for what you trying to make.

If conversely you feel heavy and stuck, figure out a way to move that energy around. Perhaps you do the reverse of what we just mentioned: start your spirals slow and then speed them up. Give yourself a minute dedicated to slow movements that become more progressively energized. Put on some music and use it to zing your brain cells up.

If you find that you can’t find a way to do what you planned, ask what still is possible?

What piece or part of the creative project you planned to work on suits the state of being you’re currently in?

If things are slow and you feel flat and out of ideas, draw on something you previously made that perhaps needs shaping in a different direction. What’s necessary work for this project that is more methodical, logical or mundane?

You’ll find just by taking action, things naturally start to change.

Which leads us to the next part….

 

✏️ You have to let yourself be new moment to moment

Don’t presuppose you are going to feel the same way you do now in five minutes time.

You have to allow yourself to be different. Emotions and feelings are mecurial. They flux and change, ebb and flow. Even if your start point doesn’t feel that great, there’s no need to assume your middle point or your end point will be anywhere near the same, provided you give yourself the permission to be different.

 

💛 If the resistance is physical…

Let yourself be disembodied. Pull yourself apart and put yourself back together by finding a new arrangement.

Work on the floor. Work standing up. Work and speak out loud. Work while you’re walking (this one actually is genius- it’s so hard to write or draw or whatever while walking, you’ll find the contrast makes it feel easy when you return to sitting down).

 

💛 If the resistance is mental…

Act in support of what you want to come to life. You can’t think your way into creative action: you have to do it.

The annoying truth is that you’re unlikely to find the answer you are looking for in the same part of your brain that’s causing the problem. You have to lead yourself to a different brain space- literally and metaphorically- by changing things up.

Interrogate what you find hard and remove what isn’t necessary. Reduce the friction where you can.

 

💛 If the resistance is mysterious and perplexing…

Do something you know the answer to as a start point. To build confidence, begin with something you already know.

Write the answer to a question you’ve asked yourself that you’re clear about. Draw the thing you are most practiced in drawing. Start with the familiar and let it lead you progressively towards the things that are more unknown.

And perhaps the most important:

 

🤸‍♀️ Commit to your own creative joy

Work from the assumption that your creativity likes you, that this work that you are doing is work that’s itching and excited to be made. Understand your role is to uncover the adventure.

I read something from a famous author recently who mentioned that their process of writing was full of self-loathing. They offered this as a declarative statement, as though it were an inevitable truth, and it was widely supported by commenters as though it were the most normal thing, this depressive and sludge filled pond that is the creative process.

I whole heartedly reject this, and what’s more I believe I have a world view that supports me in doing so. Here’s a snapshot for you now:

Creativity, I believe, is part of the gift economy. What are inspiration and ideas if not gifts, bestowed on us by forces untamable and untouchable?

And in the presence of that gift, I get to ask:

What is my responsibility to these ideas, to this creating? What is my offering back?

For any ecosystem to thrive- and creating is an ecosystem like any other- we rely on mutual flourishing. We rely on each other to do well in order that we are free to contribute to the creative compost pool from where ideas and inspiration are drawn.

My suffering and certainly my self-loathing, does not benefit this cycle in any way. In fact, beyond it being harmful, it’s nonsensical. It does nothing to contribute to the community or ecology of creative upliftment.

It’s one thing for creating to be hard, but hard-ness and joy are not mutually exclusive. Just like hard-ness and suffering are not intrinsically coupled together. When it comes to creativity, how we approach it is our choice.

Because creativity is the gift. And our job is to put ourselves in the position where we are free to endlessly accept it.

👉🏻 Now, over to you.

How would you ultimately design an hour dedicated to creating, supposing that were available to you every day?

 

Happy creating!

xx Jane

 

 

 

What follows is A Tiny Guide For Big Creative Feels. Things that you can do if you find yourself in the midst of emotion when making and creating that threatens to derail you, or perhaps even stops you showing up in the first place. And we can’t be having that. Not with how fabulous you are. To think of you not creating is a travesty.

Let’s dive in.

Get curious, not spooked about your insides

If you find yourself in the midst of a big feeling, become a curiosity sleuth of your own insides. Is what you are experiencing a familiar pattern?

It might have started with a thought or with a feeling, but if the cycle your observing always plays out the same way, or if you can predict that ‘this will happen when I do this’ with a certain degree of regularity, what you’ve identified is a fight–flight response. A reflex pattern that’s historic, but might not be anything to do with this here moment.

So, it’s starts by giving yourself grace. These patterns are persuasive and they can feel absolutely “right” but the moment you bring awareness in, you create space for choice, a space where new possibilities of experience can arise.

Choosing your next action isn’t a denial of the feeling. It’s an acknowledgement of what’s real for right now (and what’s not), and an intentional decision of how you would like to move forward.

It could equally be that the experience of creating has woken your body up. Remember, creativity begins with novelty, and we can label that novelty as an idea, a spark, a possibility. Novelty is activating and expansive; it has it’s own energy. If you equate a feeling of safety with a neutral feeling body this can set off all of your alarms.

But more often than not, nothing’s wrong. This is what it means to live in a body that’s creating. All our tendrils feeling out into the world, deciding what to make next, deciding how to fuse our ideas into the creative matrix and send the result back into the creative matrix.

To feel that is your body coming to the party. This is your body being informed. It’s really quite delightful.

You are the driver of this creative showboat and you get to stop at any point. But if that’s the case, stop because you want to, not because you feel like you have no choice.

Shake it out. Move the energy through.

If the feeling your experiencing comes with a lot of energy, that energy needs to move. You can’t think your way out of a physical experience. You’re not abandoning your creative work you’re simply clearing out the chemical cocktail of fight–flight hormones that aren’t conducive to creativity.

It doesn’t have to be dramatic: a quick walk, shaking out your arms, jumping up and down, rolling yourself out. Anything that helps move the charge through so your system doesn’t short circuit and your brain can start to think straight again.

Come back to your body

It’s easy to lose your edges in the midst of big emotion. Patting or squeezing all over- from head to toe, side to side, back to front- helps consolidate your insides and ground you back inside the edges of your skin. Applying pressure to the body always wakes up your sensory receptors that help place you in the here and now, interrupting old patterns that pull you into unhelpful places and re-positioning you in the present moment.

Grow your capacity for feeling bit by bit

Capacity isn’t a heroic leap; it’s a slow widening that happens over time. Two minutes here, three minutes there, staying with the experience just a little longer each time.

This is how you expand your creative capacity; not by forcing calm, or a requiring specific state of being to get things done, but by gently increasing your ability to stay with the emotions and feelings that arise as part of the creative process.

Treat feeling as information, not instruction

Feeling will always arrive. That’s the nature of a body sensing their way through the world. Your job is to decide whether it’s something to pay attention to or just your body shifting gears.

If you can create a little wiggle room for choice, you can to decide how to move into the next moment.

Let humour and play interrupt the cycle

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.

What’s more, if you want to re-find your creative brain, humour is the way back.

By the way, how do you make a tissue dance?

Put a little boogie in it.

You’re welcome.

Happy creating,

xx Jane

This is part two of our little Creative Safety duet — the part where we take everything we talked about here in Part One (sensation, interpretation, old wiring, and the body’s potential dramatic tendencies) and bring it directly into the creative process.

Because once you understand how easily feeling or sensation get misread, the next logical question is:

What does that actually do when you try to make something?

The short answer: a lot.

The long answer is what this essay is about.

And for the sake of keeping it simple, I’m going to use ‘feeling’ and ‘sensation’ interchangeably as the felt experience happening in the body. It becomes emotion when we label it a certain thing.

Why Feeling (Or Sensation) Matters When You Make Things

We’ll start from the place of things not going quite right, where the creative experience starts to feel funky. If your mind and body both feel like dangerous neighbourhoods, it makes complete sense that creativity feels hard, because creativity at its core asks you to do three things your nervous system finds deeply suspicious:

• Enter the unknown
• Stay in the unknown
• Make something real in the unknown

And when you enter unknown things, it stands to reason that you feel a bunch of things. Perhaps unsure, perhaps apprehensive, doubtful, maybe you’re afraid, all landing in your body in a very specific way.

And if these feelings (or sensations) are at all familiar, it might be the case that you’ve been unknowingly pairing certain sensations with certain meanings — doubt, danger, inadequacy, wrongness — meaning your creative process then becomes one long tug-of-war between what you want to make and what your body thinks is happening.

This is why creativity can feel so volatile. One minute you’re excited and the next minute you’re convinced you should abandon the whole thing and take up bonsai cultivation instead (and perhaps that’s a bad example because that is actually massively appealing and also looks quite challenging but let’s carry on).

Our feelings can be loud and our interpretations of what they mean outdated.

Let’s break down how this plays out in the different phases of creative work.

The Open Loop Phase (The phase where novelty sets off all your internal alarms)

Creativity begins with novelty, and we can label that novelty as an idea, a spark, a possibility. Novelty is exciting, yes, but what I want to highlight is that physiologically it is also activating.

Novelty = movement = rearrangement = feeling and sensation.

An open, feeling body is a body in conversation with the world. In this place, sensation is not good or bad, right or wrong, it’s simply your body zinging back online in response to something new.

Staying open creativity means developing the capacity to stay in feeling.

And staying in feeling means tolerating the body’s natural activation around uncertainty.

Where we tend to pull ourselves back into contraction — or into a fight–flight state — is through interpretation: the moment we decide that what we are experiencing might be concerning, “dangerous,” or not okay. And when that happens, it drags us out of a creative state of being and straight into our survival brain.

The creative ideation phase asks you to hold uncertainty long enough for something real to form. But if you’ve trained yourself into believing that feeling or sensation is dangerous and that neutrality or calm is the “correct” state of being (which is why the message that a regulated nervous system is a calm nervous system can be so harmful), then you won’t allow yourself this creative experience.

It’s not a mindset issue or anything of the sort.

It’s a feeling issue.

And in my experience, it’s the biggest reason people quit before they start.

In a nutshell: to be creative, we need to increase our capacity for feeling.

The Closed Loop Phase: The Phase Where Things Become Real

The closed loop phase is where we shift out of an open, exploratory state and into the part of the process focused on getting the thing done. It’s the less glamorous side of creativity, where the rubber meets the road, bums are on chairs, and that glorious, nebulous idea you had starts to take form.

It’s also the phase where the stakes begin to rise. This is where urgency creeps in, where questions of quality get louder, and where the possibility for visibility becomes real.

Suddenly you’re convinced your idea is terrible, your skillset is inadequate, and the old “not good enough” narrative gets a fresh gust of wind.

Once again, if we aren’t skilled at separating our internal experience from the act of committing to the work — if we can’t hold the physical nature of those thoughts and feelings in our body and keep showing up anyway — then finishing becomes difficult.

This is the phase where projects often go to die.

And not because they were bad ideas, or because we lacked what was needed to follow through, but because we were unable to stay with ourselves — with our feelings, with our interpretations, with our discomfort — for long enough to let the work unfold.

Where Does This Leave Us?

1. Get curious about what’s happening inside you

Recognise whether what you’re experiencing is a familiar pattern. It might begin with a thought or with a feeling or sensation, but if the cycle always plays out the same way, what you’ve identified is a fight–flight response.

Give yourself grace here. These patterns are persuasive and they can feel absolutely “right” but the moment you bring awareness in, you create space for choice, the space where new possibilities of experience can arise.

2. Metabolise the physical experience

If the feeling comes with a lot of energy, that energy needs to move. You’re not abandoning your creative work you’re simply clearing out the chemical cocktail of fight–flight hormones that aren’t conducive to creativity.

It doesn’t have to be dramatic: a quick walk, shaking out your arms, jumping up and down, rolling yourself out. Anything that helps move the charge through so your system doesn’t short circuit and your brain can start to think straight again.

3. Sense your body

Your brain needs accurate sensory information to understand where you are and what’s happening. Sensing is a way to interrupt habituated patterns and bring your nervous system back into the present.

I use a two-point process, which means either placing your attention on two points and simultaneously holding them in your awareness, or moving back and forth between them.

It goes like this:

Place your attention on one part of your body, really travel your awareness there and then at the same time, notice a point outside yourself, a physical location landmark.

For example: A point on the underside of your feet and a point on the ground beneath them.

Don’t imagine those places, actually travel your attention there. Rest in that awareness for a minute.

It’s a way of teaching your nervous system that uncertainty doesn’t automatically require escape and creates an opening where you can decide what to do next.

4. Build capacity slowly

Capacity isn’t a heroic leap; it’s a slow widening that happens over time. Two minutes here, three minutes there, staying with the experience just a little longer each time.

This is how you expand your creative capacity — not by forcing calm, or a requiring specific state of being to get things done, but by gently increasing your ability to stay with the sensations and feelings that arise as part of the creative process.

5. Treat feeling as information, not instruction

Feeling will always arrive. That’s the nature of a body sensing their way through the world. Your job is to decide whether it’s something to pay attention to or just your body shifting gears.

More often than we realise, it’s the latter.

Creative capacity is the ability to feel what you feel and still choose your next step

And that skill — knowing what you’re feeling and having the capacity to stay with it — is what allows you to create a life where you can show up for your work again and again, not because it always feels good, but because you’ve built the ability to stay with yourself in the process.

Your body will always have something to say. Your job is simply to learn its language, decide what deserves interpretation, and let the rest move through.

Reflections To Play With

Which phase of the creative process brings up the most sensation for you: starting, sticking, or finishing?

What sensations tend to pull you out of the ideation phase too soon?

Do you automatically interpret activation or energy in your body as dangerous, a sign of inadequacy, or a sign to stop?

When your project becomes real, what narratives or stories flare up?

Are these feelings about the work, or about old patterns still running in the background?

If you stayed with the feeling for just one minute longer, what might become possible?

What tiny practice could help you build creative capacity over time?

Would love to hear your thoughts as always!

Happy creating,

xx Jane

 

I get a twitchy eye when I hear the words “listen to your body.” I realise this is a blasphemous thing to say—maybe even a confusing thing—coming from someone whose work has been body-based for the longest time. Bodies and brains, bodies and emotions, bodies and nervous systems, bodies and creating… it’s all so body-focused that surely listening to them must be an essential?

Well, yes and no.

If I think about the thing that really derails creative work, it’s not that we aren’t listening to our bodies. It’s that we are but sometimes we’re interpreting what we’re feeling in reactive, obscure or inaccurate ways because the whole “listen to your body” approach relies on two big assumptions:

• an accurate interpretation of your internal experience, and
• a body that’s adaptive and present

… which might not necessarily be the case.

And before we carry on, I want to mention: it’s vaguely ridiculous that we’re even talking about bodies and nervous systems at all, as though we don’t have more than enough to think about already. When this animal body of ours is moving in a world that matches its physiological design, we don’t need to talk about it. When our senses are stimulated; when movement is purposeful; when we’re in a reciprocal relationship with the land we depend on and the creatures we share it with; when we’re part of a community; when we’re not embedded in systems that reduce us to units of production, our nervous system takes care of itself. As it’s designed to. Most of its decisions are automated and unconscious, the flawed assumption being that it presupposes the world around us allows for health.

But when we find ourselves living in a reality that no longer matches the needs of our animal body, well, this is when things go pear-shaped. This is when bodies get pulled out of intuitive, natural ways of being and flung into levels of dysfunction so widespread we start to mistake them for normal.

At this point, simply “listening” isn’t enough. We need to be skilled and discerning conversationalists with our inner experience. And we need chocolate. Preferably dark. (The Lindt Dark Orange is my current fixation but I digress.)

If you’re going to listen to your body, you need to understand what it means to live in a feeling, sensing body that’s fully online. And you need to know how to tell when you’re listening to something real, and when you’re listening to a pattern.

Because knowing the difference may just change your life. (God, did I just say that? So intense. But, still I’ve found it to be true. If it lands a little heavy, let’s just say this instead: the following is something that’s is very useful.)

Before we “listen to our bodies”, we need to understand how our bodies actually work.

To make sense of this, we need to look at the nature of sensation, or feeling. And so we don’t end up tangled in the weeds together, I’m going to break this down into a couple of simple points:

1. Your body is constantly rearranging itself in response to your experience.

This rearrangement falls into two broad categories:

Expansion, a physiological opening that occurs when we’re operating from our creative or parasympathetic nervous system, and a state of being where our body is talking to our brain all day long, and contraction, a protective reflex state that occurs as part of a fight flight response.

And when I say rearranging, expanding and contracting, I mean everything—posture, organs, bones, muscle tone, breath, pressure, the whole orchestra. Even the way your body prepares for and creates movement changes.

2. We experience these micro and macro reshufflings as sensation.

When something is novel (meaning a internal rearrangment to our inner world that’s new or slightly outside the norm) it captures our attention and we register it as “feeling.”

The important thing to understand here is that sensation itself is neutral. It’s just a sign of something changing. It’s just your body doing what bodies do — adjusting, organising, responding.

The trouble begins when we assume that every sensation carries meaning. Most of the time, it doesn’t. Most of the time it’s simply the physical echo of your system shifting gears, not a message about who you are or what you’re capable of.

This is where emotion, sensation and interpretation start to blur together, and where creative people can get pulled off-course.

Emotion = Sensation + Story (and this is where things get thorny)

Still with me? Excellent. Let’s adventure on.

To understand our patterns, we need to understand emotions — specifically how we come to name them.

The scientific definition of an emotion is a physiological change. There’s nuance in there, of course, but that’s the heart of it.

The psychological definition is a physiological change plus a subjective interpretation. And that second part is where things get interesting, because it tells us this:

Emotions are infused with meaning. They are interpretative. And interpretation is the exact point where we can get ourselves into a spectacular tangle.

We can summarise it like this:

The sensation we feel is neutral — it’s simply the body rearranging itself in response to our nervous system state.

The meaning we attach to that sensation is not neutral. And if the sensation arises from an old patterned reaction — not from the present moment — then the story we attach to it will also be recycled, habitual, and often wildly inaccurate.

This is why “truth speaks the language of sensation” can be misleading for people whose patterned responses are louder than their adaptive ones.

Thought Patterns & Feeling Patterns: What Happens When Both Get Stuck Together?

Every thought you have comes with its own physical blueprint, a way it expresses itself in your body. You could consider this the physical signature of the emotion.

If you’re a human being (which I assume you are), you’ve likely experienced how a particular thought produces a predictable physical response. Maybe there’s a familiar story you play out, a narrative that loops through your head with the reliability of a broken record.

For example, let’s say you often tell yourself, “I’m not good at this.” And let’s say you’ve told yourself that again and again and again. And in response, there is a feeling.

What you’ve created is an equation, a “when I think this, I feel this” response. This is a motor pattern, or a movement pattern, if that feels easier to grasp.

You’re not just thinking — you’re activating a thought–feeling pair. The feeling arrives so quickly and so convincingly that it seems to confirm the thought, but here’s the thing:

If the thought is learned, the feeling attached to it is learned too. Neither is a signal of truth. Both are patterns running on old wiring.

One of my favourite Anne Lamott quotes is this:

My mind is a dangerous neighbourhood. I never go there alone.

And when you recognise this, you’ll also understand:

Not only does your mind feel dangerous in those moments, but your body feels dangerous also.

In part two tomorrow, I’ll show you how these sensation loops might play out in your creative work and why understanding them will change how you start, stick with, and finish the things that matter to you.

In the meantime, here are some questions to play with…

What sensations do you commonly interpret as “dangerous,” “wrong,” or “a sign to stop”?

When you have a familiar self-doubt thought (or something similarly prickly), what’s the familiar feeling that travels with it? Can you recognise this pairing as a pattern?

What sensations do you immediately try to avoid, fix, or make go away?

 

Happy creating!

xx Jane

 

 

Yesterday I wrote what I think was a very useful thing that was quite heavy on the eyeballs. In it, I talked about how your nervous system patterns can play havoc with your creative process, and I ended with a list of things to try when you find yourself spinning in an unhelpful place.

I didn’t want the important bits — the ones you can actually apply — to get lost in the mix, so I’ve made an illustrated version for you here, with a downloadable poster at the end if you need a little creative un-stucking.

Before we dive in, I wanted to tell you that you are witnessing me playing and figuring things out in real time. I love to draw, birds especially, and if you aren’t familiar, this is my usual style:

Fine ink pen and watercolour. I tried illustrating my newsletters this way, but my writing is faster than my drawing, and I eventually had to call my children back from the meadow where they were learning to forage and mend their own clothes outgrown in my absence while I illustrated everything. Which is to say, it was taking me quite a long time.

So I’ve taken it upon myself to learn to draw in ways that are looser, freer, and more playful for you here — a work in progress that involves much tinkering, a little bit of swearing, a good amount of my Concentrating Face, plenty of tea, and a generous dollop of giggle-snorting. A process that I hope you allow yourself also should you ever find yourself in similar circumstances.

So while we stumble and rumble and frolic along together, may I present you with Ways To Get Yourself Unstuck, in the hope that you’ll find it exceedingly and outrageously helpful. Or failing that, just a tiny bit good.

Ways To Get Unstuck

 

Want to download the poster? It’s all yours! 👇🏻

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