Dear Artist who keeps trying to override what your body is telling you

The body is not your opponent in the creative life. It is your most consistent informant.

Dear artist who has been pushing through for longer than you can remember,

Dear creative who has learned to work in pain, in depletion, in the particular fog of having already given too much elsewhere, and who has filed this under discipline without examining it too carefully,

Dear writer who hears the signal, the one that says this body has nothing left, this particular thing you’re asking it to do is one thing too many, and then sits down and attempts it anyway,

Dear maker who has a complicated, private relationship with the sentence “I’ll rest when I’m finished,” and who is rarely finished,

Dear musician who has treated your body’s signals as obstacles to the creative life rather than as participants in it, and who is starting, slowly, to wonder if that was a mistake,

Dear painter whose work has sometimes been very good and sometimes been the cost of a week, and who has developed a sophisticated system of avoiding that calculation too consciously,

Dear creative who is tired in a way that feels specific, accumulated, and no longer entirely about sleep,

This is for you.

Please know that I understand why you override. The pressures to produce in a creative life are real, and they do not pause for health. Deadlines do not reorganize themselves around your body’s requests. Opportunities that arrive when capacity is low are no less real than opportunities that arrive when everything is available. The work that matters to you doesn’t matter less on the days when making it is harder. And the culture you’re working in has given you very clear messages about what a serious creative person does when the body says no.

The override is how many of us have maintained a creative practice in conditions that didn’t fully support one. It has been a form of commitment, and the commitment is real. I’ve lived it. For years.

So I know that the suggestion that you should stop working or rest more is both obvious and futile. Instead, I suggest only the possibility that the signal is worth reading before you decide what to do with it.

Across a long time of asking artists about the relationship between their health and their creative work, I’ve observed that the body as creative informant tends to be considerably more precise than it first appears. The signal that presents as “I can’t create today” is, when attended to, often saying something more exact.

It might be saying that the particular kind of creative work you had planned, the one that requires sustained cognitive engagement over several hours, is unavailable today, and that a different kind of engagement, shorter, less cognitively demanding, or in a different area of the same project, might be.

It might be saying that the threshold is high today and needs to be lowered rather than pushed through.

It might be saying that the body is processing something that the creative work would also want to process, and that waiting a day might produce better work than forcing today.

When the signal is overridden without being read, this information doesn’t get used. The override treats all signals as a single category, as interference, and dismisses them uniformly. What gets dismissed alongside the interference is the often-quite-accurate information the body had about what it could and couldn’t offer.

There is also a longer-term cost to chronic overriding: when a body’s signals are consistently overridden, one of two things tends to happen over time. Some bodies escalate: the signals get louder and more intrusive, because the quiet ones weren’t heard, and eventually the body produces a signal that cannot be overridden, in the form of illness, injury, crash, or breakdown that enforces the rest that wasn’t chosen. Other bodies go quieter in ways that can feel like progress but are actually a kind of disconnection: the signals are still arriving, but the capacity to receive them has been so thoroughly suppressed that the person stops hearing them, and with them stops receiving the information the body had been trying to offer.

Neither of these is an inevitable outcome, but knowing they could happen helps us better cope if they arrive … or prevent their arrival at all.

What if there were a third option between overriding the signal and stopping entirely? What if the signal, rather than being dismissed or fully complied with, were treated as a negotiation opener?

The body says: this isn’t available today. And instead of “yes it is, we’re doing it anyway” or “fine, we’ll stop,” the response is: tell me more.

What specifically isn’t available?

What would you need to make something possible?

Is it that the full version of this work isn’t available, or is it that the version I’d planned is too much and a smaller version might be reachable?

Is it that this particular task is asking for something you don’t have today, or that there’s a different task, one that belongs to the same project, that might be more accessible from where we currently are?

This kind of negotiation requires more attention than overriding does, at least at first. It requires the willingness to slow down at the signal rather than push through it, to take it seriously as information rather than dismissing it as interference. But it tends to produce something that sustained overriding cannot: a creative practice that the body is genuinely partnered in rather than working against.

Photo by Devon Janse van Rensburg on Unsplash

Agnes Martin, whose work I find myself returning to often when thinking about this, wrote about the creative process as something she waited for rather than forced. She would begin a painting only when she could see it clearly in her own mind. Sometimes that waiting lasted days. She described this as her practice, her discipline, and from the outside it might have looked like inactivity. From the inside, she said, it was the most active part of the work. The listening was the work.

I don’t mean to suggest that waiting days is available to everyone, or that Martin’s methodology translates directly to every creative context. What I am suggesting is that the idea of the body as creative informant rather than obstacle, the idea that its signals carry information worth receiving rather than interference to be dismissed, has a long and serious creative history. The override is a strategy. There are other strategies, and it may be helpful to consider them.

Please know that the body sending signals is not the body failing you. It is the body doing its job, which includes telling you things about what it has, what it needs, and what kind of engagement is possible in any given moment. That information is useful to a creative practice, when it’s received rather than overridden. Your body is not your opponent in this. It is your most consistent informant, if you can slow down enough to hear it.

I tell you this because again and again it is what I need to tell myself.

Love,

Kathryn