Stop Sacrificing Yourself: Our Creative Lives and Mini-Deaths.

I just need a little more money and I’ll make the time to write more.

I just need to make some headway on this project at work, and then I’ll have time for me.

Sound familiar?

Stop the excuses. You’re sacrificing yourself.

I get it. Oh man, do I get it. But I don’t speak about this from a place of having achieved freedom from sacrifice. I am sharing this from a place having fallen down and fallen into the rabbit hole of not putting myself first and letting my creativity, and therefore my happiness suffer because of that. I’ve fallen again, and again, and again. But I’ve gotten back up and re-corrected my trajectory again, and again, and again.

I have put money and time and external responsibilities first and ignored the creative sparks inside. The creative spark is the creative life. And putting it on the back burner is a mini-death. For me it’s writing. My reality check was this: if it’s important, you’ll make time for it.

Over the weekend, I listened to what is quite possibly the best podcast I’ve ever heard: Brené Brown and Elizabeth Gilbert talking about creativity, life, shame, vulnerability and all things human.

These two creative goddesses brings up several points of discussion about our creative lives and mini-deaths.

If you jump and leap, will you stick the landing? ~ Brené Brown

When you get to the place where standing on the edge is more painful than risking failure, you need to leap. ~ Brené Brown

I’m still stuck in this limbo between duty and the desires of my heart. But that’s reasonable and justified. Being aware of the beauty that exists, and witnessing which direction we gravitate toward is actually more beautiful than jumping fully into snubbing our creativity or fully into jumping into creativity without a cushion to catch us if we fail. It’s beautiful because we’re witnessing gravitation toward the desires of our heart in action.

We’re at any point just tiptoeing in one direction or the other.

There’s a tipping point that sends us to either extreme if we leap, make a decision and firmly believe our decision is the be-all and end-all, but I do believe we can reach a balance. And it’s a balance where we’re not sending our creativity to the point of mini-death.

This idea that we can’t be creative until we’ve achieved x, y, or z is born out of a scarcity mentality.

This mentality does have credence to it. We live in a time where rent has to be paid, food purchased and bills paid like clockwork. We have expenses like cellphones, health insurance and internet, which we can’t go without. We are in this way tethered to a number we feel we “need” in order to meet status quo. It’s comfortable. Or at least it’s reassurance that we’re earning our comfort and working toward it. It’s cozy. It’s dark, cool and predictable–the grind of doing what we need to to get a paycheck. It’s safe. And it works.

But there’s one question to ask yourself if you’ve been feeling like you’re meant for something greater. And it’s what Brené Brown brings up in the podcast. Would you rather stay teetering on the edge and stuck in a job that’s “working” to put food on your table or would you rather leap, hope the net appears and risk failure in jumping toward what your heart sings out for.

The answer is not likely to be exclusively one or the other, because we have that inkling of curiosity to pursue creativity while still taking care for safety and security. Pursue it, make friends with it, get to know what it is that makes your heart sing out. It doesn’t happen though if you don’t carve out the space and time in your day for it. And it might be five minutes of your day or it may be an hour. Don’t be hard on yourself for not following through, but be aware. Creativity doesn’t have to be art. It can be whatever creative act of your day that feeds all parts of you–mind, body, spirit. It needs to be nurtured, fed, and paid a visit on occasion. Because if you don’t, inspiration will leave to find another home, as Elizabeth Gilbert says.