Breaking through the toughest barricade
After so many months and hours of thinking, somehow I ended up signing in to my medium account. I’ve been planning over days, while swimming through my endless fountain of thoughts, thinking where should I begin and how should I proceed and I never took that first step.
But somehow today my inner voice was so loud, and I couldn’t resist, I couldn’t ignore it at all. So I signed in to my 3-year-old unused medium account and opened my stories. Alas! What a punch on my head. “What ? a two years old draft !” I felt so bad, I felt how much time have I been wasting and why didn’t I try…
So, I decided writing this story rather writing the little techy manuscript of “why do we get stuck” when it comes to being creative and expressing our creativity because it was what I have encountered for real.
So, I reflected on what made me stay still and do nothing.
The first thing that struck my mind was that I was afraid; I thought “things would go wrong”, “how others would think about my article”, “whether people will feel that I am not an expert to talk about this topic”, “my writing is poor” and so on... Within a few minutes of brainstorming, my notepad was filled with so many negative ideas; thoughts which discouraged me. I actually wanted to stop.
But this time my inner voice was strong! It said, “ It’s okay. Don’t stop buddy! Try to figure out other things that made you stop because you gotta anyway publish this article”.So this time I listened. Therefore, I kept thinking about the other causes that made me feel less and that I am not good to become a medium writer. So, I started to wander through the woods of my thoughts, cherry-picking the causes that made me stop.
I realised that I hadn’t had a great time because of a few traumatic incidents that happened to me in the past three years, and I have been struggling to get through accepting those facts. I felt I wasn’t comfortable enough, and I have been struggling to find my home. I have been wrestling against to chase my dreams because I was not surrounded by a bunch of people who encouraged me to do what I want. I’ve been in such a dilemma of whether to listen to them or to be selfish. Oh gosh! I ended up crying as I kept writing the things that pushed me back.
After a while, I took that paper, back to my hand, I read it firmly while reading I realised that I could group these problems I encountered. So the grouping that I did accord with the types of barriers that limit us from expressing our best creative self — “The creative blocks” Bam! Wasn’t this I tried telling too technically? Yeah, it was.
So as you all can see, in some point in our life, we feel like we don’t make a move, we don’t do what we want to do, and we are all stuck. There will be so much resistance blocking our path, not letting us move forward. The bigger the dream, the tougher the resistance is.
To be true, it is tough to break through these blocks, but I promise you that it is something that you and I can do. To do that, it’s good for us if we are aware of why we get stuck, and that is going to be our first step.
To give a heads-up on the first step being aware of what’s happening to us, this is what we can do. Based on the literature, all of these blocks can be categorised as, Perceptual block, Emotional Block, Intellectual Block and Environmental block, and this is what tallied with my grouping of the problems that I had. Thus, standing on these categories we can cluster the difficulties that we encounter so that we will have a better understanding of what we all are facing, By doing so, it’ll enable us to figure out what is the best strategy to eliminate these blocks. As far as I know through my instincts, Eliminating a cluster of blocks would be effective than eliminating things one by one.
So entwining my personal experiences together with the theoretical aspects of creativity and creativity blockbusting, I hope to discuss with you all in-depth on the types of blocks and the strategies to overcome in the next few articles to come.
So stay tuned to “An Amature Speaks — on Creativity” to learn more on how to break through the toughest barricades we encounter, and how to move forward with confidence!
