The other day I was leading a group call and something happened that I wanted to share, because I know it’s relevant to a lot of people. Lumpy gravy is involved, and microscopes, and corrals. It’s all in service of avoiding distractions so you can get your important work done and live the full-color life you long for.
First. some background. [Read more…]
Last week I sloughed off my normal life and immersed myself in an intensive workshop at BATS Improv.
We spent three and a half days playing games, sharing true stories, making stories up, and learning to do all of it as effortlessly as possible.
(As always, I was there wearing my student hat, and also madly taking notes wearing my teacher hat, collecting ideas for my next playshop!)
On Sunday, during a discussion about how to handle potentially sticky interactions with audience members, the teachers, Rebecca and William, shared a story that happened years ago, when the two of them were performing in an improv show called This Is Your Life, in which they brought a volunteer up from the audience to (you guessed it) interview about her life.
Rebecca found out that the volunteer interviewee was a mother of two, and after the woman had shared quite a bit about her daughter, Rebecca asked her about her son. There was a pause, and tears welled up in the woman’s eyes.
“My son died six months ago,” she croaked out.
The audience let out a sympathetic gasp, followed by a very loud silence. Womp. The energy in the theater dropped with a thud.
For an improviser onstage, this is rather a nightmare scenario. In the pressure of the spotlight, one might be tempted to somehow brush it all under a rug, move on, maybe (egad) even make a joke out of it. Thankfully, Rebecca did nothing of the sort.
Instead, she reached for a box of tissues sitting on the table nearby, pulled a tissue out for herself, then handed one to the woman. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Do you want to talk about him?”
“No, I don’t,” said the woman. Then she proceeded to talk about nothing but her son for the next twenty minutes. (Isn’t that so often how it happens?)
A horribly uncomfortable moment was transformed into a beautiful one, and it didn’t stop there. The volunteer interviewee came back to every BATS show that week, and even after moving to another state with her husband, she still attends BATS shows whenever she’s in San Francisco.
What Rebecca and William only learned later, though, was that this uncomfortable moment onstage gave the woman her life back.
It turns out that she was an artist, but had been unable to paint since the death of her son. Rebecca’s question during that improv show was the catalyst that finally allowed this woman to start processing her grief, and enabled her to get back to painting.
Art gave this woman her art back.
It’s serendipitous that I heard Rebecca’s story last week, because I recently received two emails in the span of four days, each addressing the issue of how loss and grief affect our ability to create. With the permission of the sendees, today’s Question Time post today is inspired by their notes.
Dear Ms. Dinwiddie,
I have read your website with great enjoyment. I hope it is alright to ask a question and I do understand if you are unable or unwilling to answer.
You have mentioned that you have had large blocks of time, in years, when you haven’t been able to create. May I please ask what you did that enabled you to go back to creating?
I have read your blog from May 3, 2013, “How to Get Out of a Creative Rut” and I think what I’m after is what happened before that to enable you to start again. Self-permission? Self-acceptance? What happened to allow you to let go and start again?
I have been a bit lost and unable to sustain any creative idea since my remaining parent passed away four years ago. I am 54 years old.
Thanks so much for your time and an excellent website.
Kind regards,
Linda
Dear Melissa,
My biggest challenge is picking myself up and starting over again. I facilitate journal groups for women, but after my father died three years ago I felt the wind fall from the sails. I am 71 years young, but it is clear as I rise from this self-imposed fog of grief and loss that I am finally ready to move on.
But how (one step at a time?) and to where? Ah, that’s bigger question.
The key word here may be sustain. I find that my creative energy goes in spurts and stops, has a difficult time digging in to focus.
Best,
Susan
Dear Linda and Susan,
First, let me say how sorry I am for your losses. It is not at all surprising that you’ve felt lost and unable to focus. Grief does that.
My own lengthy periods of creative paralysis were not initiated by grieving a death, so I can’t speak to your loss from an equivalent experience of my own. What I do know about grief, though, is that each of us has our own process and timeline. Processing a loss cannot be rushed.
That said, Rebecca’s story lends strength to the theory that telling your story, letting it out, is key to clearing the blockage that grief can put on our lives. I’m a big believer in the power of sounding boards, whether in the form of a therapist, a trusted friend, or a theater audience! I hope you each have a set of empathetic ears you can turn to — this may be the biggest healer of all.
Meanwhile, since both of you have expressed a desire and a sense of readiness to get back to creating, it sounds like you’ve moved past the frozen numbness of the early stages of grief. Noticing the desire is an important step! In fact, it’s the first half of my Golden Formula — self-awareness + self-compassion = the key to everything good — hooray for self-awareness!
The second half of the Golden Formula, the self-compassion piece, is equally important here. You have the awareness that you want to start creating again, and the feelings that go along with wanting something and not having it yet: perhaps frustration, sadness, longing. If you’re like me, you might even feel some anger and disgust at yourself for not getting on with it already.
This is where you get to practice mindful self-compassion: notice all those feelings, even the bad ones, and remind yourself that feelings like these do not mean there’s something wrong with you; they mean you’re human.
Our tendency is so often to react to bad feelings with more of the same: “I’m so frustrated with myself. And now I’m disgusted with myself for being frustrated with myself! BAD MELISSA! BAD! What the hooey is wrong with you?? You’ll never amount to anything!”
You’ve probably already experienced how unhelpful and counter-productive this is, so why not try the opposite tactic?
Dr. Kristin Neff, author of Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind, offers this mantra for anytime you notice yourself feeling badly about anything:
This is a moment of suffering.
Suffering is part of life.
May I be kind to myself in this moment.
May I give myself the compassion I need.
With this approach, the ranty monologue above can transform into a kind of dialogue:
“I’m so frustrated with myself.”
“Oh, sweetheart, I know you’re frustrated. This is a moment of suffering, dear one.”
“But I’m just disgusted with myself!”
“Yes, my beloved, I feel how painful that is. I’m going to wrap you in my arms and hold you. You deserve nothing but kindness and love.”
With each day that passes, I become more and more convinced that self-awareness and self-compassion truly are the key to everything.
Meanwhile, let’s talk about sustaining focus.
I hear you both that you want to be able to sustain your creative ideas and focus for longer than you currently feel able. Again, the Golden Formula comes in handy here.
You can use your self-awareness to ask: What are you feeling when you find it hard to focus? Where do you feel it — your gut? Your heart? Your head? Your toes? What impedes your focus? What helps it?
Then, whatever your answers are, how can you be kind and compassionate to yourself? It may be that short periods of focus are simply part of your healing process, so can you allow yourself to heal, while noticing what helps you sustain your focus for longer?
Linda asks what happened that enabled me to start again after being so blocked up, and yes, self-permission and self-acceptance were a big part of it. After all, nothing is possible if we don’t give ourselves permission. And unless we allow our creative efforts to be what they are — even if we don’t like what we create — our tender creative spirits will stay locked up in an attempt to keep us safe.
Now I’ll ask you whether you’ve been denying yourself permission.
It’s not at all unusual for a survivor to deny herself the good life within her grasp. “How can I possibly allow myself to be joyful,” the thinking goes, “when others are suffering, or gone?”
This impulse comes from a good-hearted place, but it’s misguided and unhelpful. Piling your suffering on top of the already existing suffering doesn’t cancel it out; it only creates more suffering. The way to counteract the pain of suffering is to shine your light as brightly as you can, to show yourself and others the goodness that’s possible.
As I’ve written elsewhere, in my years on the planet I have come to the following conclusion:
Creating more suffering in the world by stifling my own joy does not make the world a better place. (Click to tweet this.)
Even though you may not be saving starving children on the other side of the planet, pursuing happiness in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone else is making one tiny part of the world better. (That part being YOU!)
And making one tiny part of the world better creates ripples that affect a much bigger part of the world.
Giving yourself permission to let go and start again could even inspire others to do the same — we just never know how what we do will touch people.
As for how, and to where, this is the question every one of us asks, whether we’re mourning or not. In some way, we are all starting again, whether it’s taking tentative steps toward creating after a long hiatus, or pulling out the 300th new canvas in as many days, or editing that screenplay you now realize isn’t done after all.
Until we learn to fly, one step at a time is all we can ever take. It never seems like it will get us anywhere, but surprisingly, it’s the only thing that ever does.
I think it is the fate of virtually all creatives to be always dissatisfied, whether with the size or intensity of our efforts or the resulting product, but it is this “queer divine dissatisfaction,” as Martha Graham put it so eloquently, “a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
You are alive. Keep marching, step by tiny step, and the path will reveal itself.
I’m cheering you on.
PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!
Have you taken the Strengthsfinder 2.0 inventory? Buy the book and inside you’ll find a sealed envelope with a one-time code to take the test, designed by the Gallup Poll folks, which purports to tell you your top five strengths.
According to Strengthsfinder, my top strength is Connectedness, and my next highest strength is Achiever.
Anyone who knows me would not be the least surprised at this second one.
That number two strength, Achiever, means that one of the features of being me is a constant need for achievement.
This can be a good thing, as it drives me to keep going, growing, and reaching.
It can also be a not-so-good thing, as I’m prone to feeling pretty unhappy on days when I don’t produce much. Face it, I’m happiest when I feel like I’ve been really productive.
Here’s what the Gallup Business Journal has to say about the Achiever type (emphases mine):
Your Achiever theme helps explain your drive. Achiever describes a constant need for achievement. You feel as if every day starts at zero. By the end of the day you must achieve something tangible in order to feel good about yourself. And by “every day” you mean every single day — workdays, weekends, vacations. No matter how much you may feel you deserve a day of rest, if the day passes without some form of achievement, no matter how small, you will feel dissatisfied.
Yep. That’s me to a T.
Not surprisingly, this can make it hard for me to truly relax.
A real vacation I can enjoy (though I also confess that my vacations tend to be pretty oriented toward doing something, rather than lying around doing nothing). However, a “hooky day” that becomes a “hooky day” because other stuff gets in the way of my intentions, or because I’m just tired or feeling rebellious, that leaves me feeling yucky.
Take yesterday. By any reasonable measure, yesterday was a great day:
MB and I even made a start toward implementing the new backup system we have planned for my new iMac, which involved much untangling and unplugging of cables (many of which turned out — lo and behold — not to be plugged into anything (!)) and initiating transferring my computer backups to a brand, new backup drive. This counted, big time, toward my long-term clutterbusting goals (even though it has temporarily made my studio even more cluttered…)
A good day, right?
Yet when I went to bed I felt frustrated. Dissatisfied. I never got to the projects I’d intended to make inroads on, which left me filled with a sense of “I’m not making any progress,” which in turn led me down the road to hopelessness, despair, and “what’s the point?”
Years ago I might have wallowed in this state of unhappiness for days. This was never helpful (still isn’t), and usually led me to be even less productive the next day, rather than more, creating a rather vicious cycle.
Thankfully, over the years I’ve evolved a much more useful response. Last night, when I noticed my feelings heading down from dissatisfaction toward despair, I whipped out my Golden Formula:
Self-awareness + self-compassion = the key to everything good. (Click to tweet this!)
So what does that mean? How does one actually apply this formula in practice?
Here’s a peek at what works for me and how I used it last night:
My first step is the opposite of what I used to do. Instead of trying to stuff the feelings or make them go away, I instead practice self-awareness or mindfulness.
I consciously notice my feelings, as if “stepping outside of the distress” to look at it from the outside, from a place of neutrality.
I observe with curiosity, rather than judgment.
“Huh,” I might say to myself, “I notice I’m feeling dissatisfied. I notice a sense of despair starting to creep up on me.”
Practicing mindfulness this way is like looking at myself-in-my-distress as a fascinating creature under the microscope. And because I know that feelings are transitory, I can more easily separate myself from my feelings.
This practice of self-awareness doesn’t make me feel better, in that it doesn’t make the lousy feelings stop, but it loosens their grip on me. Something about separating myself from my feelings makes them easier to bear. It helps me become more comfortable with my discomfort.
(Side Benefit of Enormous Proportions: since I know that just about everything worth doing requires me to lean into discomfort to one degree or another, getting comfortable with discomfort is the Number One skill to develop if you want to accomplish anything worth doing! (Click to tweet this!)
Our reflex is so often to respond to ourselves in a harsh, judgmental way. When I’m frustrated at not achieving a goal I’d set for myself, the temptation is strong to lambast myself.
But beating yourself up is not an effective long-term motivator. Self-flagellation only makes you feel worse, and with the threat of a beating looming if you fail next time, it becomes safer not to try at all.
Yikes! Talk about an anti-incentive!
Nowadays, my motto is, “Don’t beat yourself up, love yourself up.” (Click to tweet this!) I’ve found it works a helluva lot better.
From that observer viewpoint “outside of the distress,” here’s how I can react:
I can comfort myself for feeling bad:
“Oh, sweetie, I know you’re feeling frustrated. I hear you. I understand.”
I can remind myself of reality and remind myself I’m not alone:
“I hope you can see that it was actually a good day in many ways, even though it also left you feeling hugely frustrated. It was so fun to spend time with MB, and you’ve made real progress on getting an automatic backup system set up. Besides, everyone has days when they accomplish less than they’d like. And everybody deserves a rest day — it’s really okay that you took one.”
I can mentor myself to make whatever adjustments are necessary to make tomorrow a better day:
“I know you’d like to feel more productive tomorrow, so let’s think about how we can make sure that happens. Let’s spend some time journaling to figure out what you’d like to accomplish tomorrow, what might get in the way, how to avoid those stumbling blocks, and what you’ll do if you trip on one.”
(For more details on self-compassion and why it’s so important and effective, I highly recommend Kristin Neff’s book, Self-Compassion.)
All of the above is exactly what I did. And since I still have a long way to go on my goal of reasonable goal-setting, I expect to get many more opportunities to practice implementing this Golden Formula.
Bring it on, baby! I’m ready!
Meanwhile, excuse me, but sure and begorrah, ’tis a grand day to be alive! I’m off to achieve something this Saint Patrick’s Day. 😉
May the road rise to meet you.
PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!
Of the two of us, MB is definitely the one with the more “even keel.” Compared to him, my moods are rather like a roller-coaster: high highs, low lows, and a lot of swerving in between.
That said, I’m rarely what I would call depressed.
I might feel down for a short time, but the life-sucks-and-I-don’t-want-to-do-anything-but-read-novels-in-bed-and-the-idea-of-dealing-with-existing-utterly-exhausts-me-and-I’d-like-to-just-disappear kind of depression thankfully doesn’t happen very often.
So I was rather surprised when I felt just that the other day.
My mood had been on a bit of a down trend for a few days, and then I woke up and felt, well, pretty miserable. The temptation was very strong to wallow in the feeling, pull the covers over my head, and shut out the world. But I resisted that temptation.
Instead, I got mindful.
As I like to say, self-awareness + self-compassion = the key to everything good (click to tweet this!), and so I consciously practiced some of both.
Instead of being driven by my depressed feelings, I took a metaphorical step back, and noticed them.
“Hunh,” thought I, “I notice feelings of depression. How fascinating.”
I acknowledged that this kind of feeling was rare for me, and wondered what might be causing it. When I remembered that my period was drawing nigh, I had an explanation that made sense. I don’t normally exhibit PMS symptoms, but very occasionally I have noticed an unusually down mood before my period.
Having an explanation didn’t change my emotional state — I still felt lousy — but it lifted some of the fear that had been creeping in, that I might (egad) get stuck this way.
The biggest thing this mindfulness approach did, though, was to create a separation between me and my emotional state.
Instead of just sitting in the depression, a part of me was able to step outside of it and just notice it. I still felt depressed, but mindfulness gave me some breathing room and a chance to choose my response to the feeling, rather than just sinking into it.
One possible response — and definitely the most appealing one at the moment — was to just spend the day in bed. But in the space opened up by mindfulness, I was able to instead ask myself if that was what I really wanted to do. Would spending the day in bed, reading novels and sleeping, make me feel better or happier at the end of the day?
Unlikely. What makes me happiest (as someone with Achiever as my #2 Strengthsfinder strength) is a sense of accomplishment. So spending the day in bed would have a much higher chance of making me feel more depressed, rather than less, at the end of the day.
So I drew up a list of all the stuff I really wanted to get done, and I asked myself which were the THREE things on that list that I’d feel most pleased to have checked off by the time I went to bed, and most annoyed to have NOT checked off.
Then I pulled myself out of bed, still depressed, and got on with tackling those three things.
Was I magically un-depressed at the end of the day? No, I still felt pretty lousy. But I also had a sense of accomplishment, despite the depression. And I was able to see that the feeling was very likely transitory. It did not define me.
This is the “magic” of self-awareness.
The Universe acts in mysterious ways. The day that I started to write about this experience, I happened to tune into my local radio station right when they were airing a live interview from months back with Jon Kabat-Zinn, the originator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, or MBSR.
He was being interviewed by Kelly McGonigal, author of The Willpower Instinct, and teacher of The Science of Willpower, a Stanford Continuing Studies course which I’m enrolled in right now.
And it just so happens that I’m running a Willpower Instinct reading circle inside the Creative Ignition Club, starting on Thursday! (There’s still time to join in.)
I’ve never studied MBSR, I’d never even heard of it, but I resonated with Kabat-Zinn immediately. What he and McGonigal were discussing was exactly what I had been practicing the day before, when I was so depressed!
We don’t reduce stress (or depression, or any emotional state) by resisting it, or trying to stuff it away, but rather by noticing it and allowing it to be.
Mindfulness, it turns out, is also a powerful willpower booster. When we can act mindfully, we’re less likely to be driven by unconscious impulse.
The impulses don’t go away (I still want a cookie, I still want to lie in bed instead of getting up and getting on with my task list, I still feel depressed, etc.), but we’re better able to access that part of our brain that is in charge of getting us to do the “harder thing,” the thing we really want in the long run.
Hence my ability to get out of bed, even on a highly depressed day, and get stuff done.
The first piece of homework McGonigal gave us in The Science of Willpower class was to meditate five minutes a day* — one of the best ways on the planet to not only practice mindfulness, but to strengthen your willpower throughout the rest of your day.
(Given that I’ve been meditating daily since last April, ten to fifteen minutes every morning, my homework was kind of a breeze. :))
I can only wonder if I’d have been able to respond with such self-awareness to waking up depressed a year ago, before I started meditating.
Of course I’ll never know, but what I do know is that the lessons I’ve learned from The Willpower Instinct have proven hugely helpful. I’m excited to be going over this material again, little by little, over a period of several weeks, both in class with McGonigal, and in my reading circle inside the Creative Ignition Club. The book was a quick read, but there’s just too much good stuff to absorb in a weekend!
I’ll let you know how it goes.
*That, or get regular, consistent (read: more) sleep. Also a powerful willpower booster.
NOTE: This post is in no way intended to give the message that mindfulness is a cure-all for clinical depression! I was not clinically depressed, and I’m certainly not a medical professional. Simply sharing my own experience.
Want to learn tools for making it easier to leap past distractions and get to your creative thing? Join the Creative Ignition Club and you can be part of our Willpower Instinct reading circle. Click here for all the details. The cart closes after Wednesday, FYI, so if you want to join in, now’s the time.
PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!
