On Turning Outside When Perhaps I Need to Turn Inward

Just some thoughts about where we get our information and inspiration as we design our creative lives ....

This is what I look like today.

Each of us is a specific, unique individual human being made up of our genetics and intergenerational history, our biology, and the one of a kind experiences that we've had day to day since the time that we were born. It's an amazing thing. And yet, what's just as amazing, is that we aren't all that different from one another in most ways.

Sometimes I forget that both of these things are simultaneously true. More specifically, I've been remembering lately that I'm not all that unique in the thoughts, feelings and creative process that I'm going through right now.

I've kind of been in the weeds for a while in terms of what I'm doing with my writing, my art, my career, my life. I've noticed what's not working, I've tweaked what I'm doing, and I've started dreaming bigger dreams (although quite murky ones.) I've taken business classes and gone on creative journeys and I've started making a whole lot of space so that the next new thing can come in.

In the muck of those weeds, I have often felt alone. I don't mean that I'm lonely or that I lack support. I have an amazing support system (including many of you here!) But I've clung hard to the belief that each one of us must uniquely design our lives, so I keep spinning trying to find "the answer." And the answer, yes, is going to be unique. But the questions are very, very common ... and really are at the crux of exactly what I've been exploring for years:

What creative work can I do and how can I do it to while nurturing my all-around health and how can I make enough money at it to live the life I want to live?

Paradoxically, at the same time that I've felt nearly immobilized by trying to figure out the answer that's right for me all by myself, I've also turned to external content to help me find the answers - in ways that I'm recognizing are not always useful.

A friend sent me a meme recently that referenced my Enneagram type (I’m a five, for those who are into that.) I like personality tests and quizzes of all kinds for the things that they can cause me to explore about myself, whether or not I’m a one hundred percent believer in framework. This one said something about how I obsessively collect knowledge but never fully trust my own knowledge. The context was funny and I laughed but the sentiment stuck with me.

I love knowledge, I love information, I love doing deep dives into random topics that happen to catch my fancy. When I want to learn something, I devour sources about it. I love to curate bodies of information and distill them down into my own writing. Nothing wrong with that - it's a thing about myself I know is true and celebrate.

But it's also true that I don't always trust my own instincts or the power of my own knowledge. I was always "good at school" and even at 44 seem to find myself trying to find "the right answer" as though life is a test. As though there is one right way to do what I'm trying to do creatively.

But the answers aren’t necessarily external. I consume other people’s thoughts almost all day long, and even when I'm able to reduce mindless TV and true crime podcasts and the endless scroll, I can always justify hours and hours spent on "smart" TV and podcasts and definitely always on books. There's a huge positive to this, particularly with books, in that often what I'm consuming allows me to think in new ways about the problems I'm trying to solve in my own mind. When a book resonates, it helps me to feel less alone while I try to figure out what's right for me.

But maybe I'm not pausing enough to do the figuring out. I'm taking in the thoughts of others but not giving time for that to merge with my own uniqueness. I go to extremes. I either feel like I'm entirely alone and have to figure out every step by myself (impossibly daunting) or I think that the right answer is out there and someone else can tell it to me. Neither are true. But hold aspects of truth.

Me, 40-ish years ago. Pretty sure that girl knows some stuff.

Over a decade ago, when I started to blog about the content that would become my book Crochet Saved My Life, I never knew that anyone else out there felt that the same was true for them. I just put out there what was uniquely true for me and people started to share their stories and I realized there was a whole community of people who had similar experiences. I wasn't trying to come up with a whole new way of living life (although ultimately I did come up with Hook to Heal, a guide of crochet exercises I designed for harnessing how to use crochet to improve life). I was just sharing what was true for me and then allowing other people to respond in a way that informed and enhanced my understanding of my own experience.

What I'm going through now is not unique either. The way that I want to do my creative work is changing because I am changing - aging, entering a new phase of my body of work, transitioning in my career, coping with different aspects of the impact of health. So many other creatives have experienced this throughout time. And so many other creatives are experiencing things similar to what I immediately feel about social media and self-marketing and the gig economy.

So, yes, it's helpful to turn to other people's writing about this stuff to help me remember that I am not alone. To give me clues about how to proceed. To find hacks that help me with the logistics of work and money. But it's also critical that I create spaciousness for turning inside for my own exploratory answers. And then to share those, because that's the thing I can offer the world as I go through my own version of a process that's similar to but different from so many other people.

The work is coming slower than I'd like. But as I make the space, it does come.

This is the creative process. And this is intricately linked with mental health in the sense that all of my neuroses come into play (hence the resonance of that Enneagram meme) and all of my defense mechanisms pop up (intellectualizing consumed content instead of feeling my way into what's heart-wrenchingly true for me) and all of it makes me feel tired and need lots of naps.

And that’s okay.

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