How I Choose to Create During A Pandemic
There’s so much noise on social media right now, Medium being another one of those platforms where people have flocked to express themselves and just like anywhere else it can be overwhelming and irrelevant.
It’s distracting from actually creating something of value. It traps people who are operating from fear in a place of helplessness; where they churn out stories like cheeseburgers.
Thank you, but I don’t do fast food.
We are meant to go into deep spaces of solitude and isolation to bring back treasures from our psyche that are true gold.
But what happens when you jump onto a digital platform to share that hard earned gold and find that people are spinning gold like it’s coming out of their ears? The noise devalues that experience and so much of what is coming out right now is based on a fear of survival.
I don’t have the answers; I often feel like I get them as I go and since I’m going today I want to share with you my methods for staying centered and true.
Limit your availability
I’m sort of a device junkie. I have different devices for different activities I like to do scattered about throughout parts of the house. I like having access.
Well, so do other people.
I choose to not be available via phone, social media, or text until I have had breakfast, taken my morning walk, journaled, showered, and have already begun to strategize how I would like to direct my energy for the day.
I need to be clear, otherwise the requests dictate what I will achieve; the questions and inquiries steer me off into a direction that have nothing to do with my own creative goals.
Give yourself a good minute to collect yourself before pulling back the curtains so you enter your day clear and goal-oriented.
Creativity isn’t magic
Go easy on yourself. Being a creator can feel like one long string of events that seem to amount to nothing.
It isn’t true.
Take a moment and a few journal pages to write out everything you have created in the past year. Note your accomplishments, what you liked, what you were proud of.
My list turned out to be incredibly long and although it’s only been a year and some months since I decided to be a full time creator, I was shocked and relieved to see how many ideas I was able to manifest outside of me.
Count the small wins.
One of my wins, which as I consider it now, is rather small, but felt like pulling teeth while I was doing it, was publishing one poem a day on my Instagram account. I would stylize the post and type up the poem on my typewriter and try to figure out a bunch of tags I could use to appeal to the poetry community. I did this for 4 months until I grew out of it and had 150 friends by the end of the experiment. You can read those poems here. I also ended up compiling the poetry into a book.
It’s a small win but one that I am proud of and definitely goes into the heap.
Take Small Actionable Steps
I keep anywhere from 7–10 journals working on different projects. The personal course load can feel devastating if I don’t put my ideas into action and have them organized. Otherwise, ideas sit for months collecting no progress.
Committing to small daily steps that bring you closer to your goals is the key to unlocking massive creativity flashes.
The best part about it is that you choose what small means. For example, as I endeavor to write memoir professionally, sometimes small means just thinking about doing it for 10 minutes during the day.
There are days where I find myself entirely engrossed in the task but without showing up daily just to find out what I want to do, I would never get anything done.
Go easy on yourself during this time. Create because it’s an extension of your heart space and not because fear is driving you into a total creative breakdown.
Taking the fear approach can position you for trauma in the future when you really do want to create.
Stay centered now and create with intention without needing the results to save you from yourself but rather using the process to gain a new perspective of why you’re here on this planet.
