Dear Artist who dreads the moment before beginning ...
Your body is in one state, ordinary life, the awareness that belongs to ordinary tasks and ordinary time, and the work requires a different state, something more open, more exposed...
Dear artist who sits down to make something and feels, in the moment before beginning, something closer to dread than readiness,
Dear creative who knows this feeling so well you could describe it second by second: the way the air changes when you’re about to start, the weight that settles in,
Dear writer who has learned to recognize, before the cursor has blinked twice, whether this is going to be a session that opens or a session that closes,
Dear maker whose materials are arranged and whose time is protected and who has done everything right and who still feels, in that last moment before starting, something you haven’t found the right word for yet,
Dear musician who has stood at the creative threshold so many times, some of those times dreading it, and who has learned to stop trusting the dread as a predictor of what will happen on the other side,
Dear painter whose hand sometimes hesitates at the canvas in a way you don’t fully understand and can’t fully explain to anyone who hasn’t felt it,
Dear human who does the thing anyway and who carries the dread forward into the work, most of the time, because there doesn’t seem to be another option,
This is for you.
The dread at the creative threshold is real. Please know that I’m not going to suggest it means something is wrong with you, or that properly committed artists don’t experience it, because neither of those things is true. The dread is a real physiological event. Something in the body and nervous system registers the approach to creative work as a threshold, a crossing from one state into another, and for many artists, especially artists whose health has made creative work difficult or costly or unreliable at various points, that threshold carries weight. The body has learned to take it seriously.
Most of us, the first time we became aware of dreading our own creative work rather than looking forward to it, take the dread as evidence of something. Evidence that we weren’t really artists, or that the work wasn’t worth doing, or that something had broken in the relationship between us and making. The dread felt like a verdict. It felt like the work itself, or some important part of us, was offering a warning.
What the dread almost always turns out to be, on examination, is something considerably less final than that. I promise.
The creative threshold is a real and specific psychological and physiological event. Your body is in one state, ordinary life, the awareness that belongs to ordinary tasks and ordinary time, and the work requires a different state, something more open, more exposed, more willing to not-know. That transition between states has a cost. It takes something to cross from one to the other. A body that has experienced the crossing as painful, exhausting, frustrating, or uncertain at various points will develop a response to the approach of that crossing that registers as dread rather than readiness.
This is accurate rather than irrational. It is the body updating its predictions based on its history. If creative work has sometimes led to hours of frustration, or to the grief of being unable to make what you could see, or to the crash that comes after making when health is fragile, or to the exposure and vulnerability of finishing something and having it received badly, then the body has learned that the creative threshold is a place where real things happen and often they don’t feel good. The dread is the body’s candid assessment of what it knows.
The problem with treating the dread as a verdict rather than as information is that it tends to make the threshold itself the obstacle, rather than the underlying thing the dread is pointing toward. Once the threshold becomes the obstacle, the work becomes about getting past the dread rather than about what the dread might actually be saying. And that doesn’t really work.
What the dread is usually saying, when you can slow down enough to listen rather than push through or turn away, is important. Sometimes it’s saying the body needs a moment before it can cross, two minutes of quiet or some physical movement or the transition ritual this body has learned it requires. Sometimes it’s saying the entry point you’ve chosen is too large for what’s available today, that a smaller starting point would lower the threshold enough to make crossing possible. Sometimes it’s saying that today’s creative state is accessible through a different door than the one you planned: a different piece, a different task, a ten-minute engagement rather than the hour you’d planned.
And sometimes, less often but accurately, it’s saying not today. That too is a legitimate answer.
What I’ve found, across many years of paying attention to this, is that artists who develop the most sustainable creative practices tend to be the ones who have learned to hear the dread rather than simply react to it. Who can slow down at the creative threshold long enough to ask: what is this, specifically? Where in the body is it? What is it about? Is it about the work, or about the crossing, or about something entirely unrelated to either that has arrived at this moment and attached itself to the creative task?
Those questions don’t dissolve the dread. They don’t make the threshold easier than it is, or make the work safer than it is, or guarantee that crossing will be smooth. What they do is give the dread back its function, which is to be information rather than an obstacle. The body knows things about what creative work requires and what’s available in any given moment that the planning mind tends to override. The dread at the threshold is one way the body communicates that knowledge.
What if, the next time the dread arrives, you stayed with it for just a moment before deciding what it means? Before treating it as a reason to push harder or a reason to turn back, before deciding it’s evidence of something wrong with you or with the work, before interpreting it at all, what if you simply noticed it? Where it lives in the body. What it actually feels like. What it might be trying to tell you about what you need in order to cross, or whether today’s creative threshold is even the right one.
Please know that the dread before beginning does not make you less of an artist. It doesn’t predict what’s on the other side of the threshold. It doesn’t mean the work is not worth attempting, or that you are unworthy of attempting it. It is your body taking the creative threshold seriously, and the threshold is worth taking seriously.
You have crossed it before. You will cross it again. And the dread, attended to rather than pushed through, might actually help you find a way across that is more available to the body you have today.
With gentleness,
Kathryn