Creativity is a decision that asks to be taken

It is like a deep breath. I can't take it for you, and you can't take it for me.

Dear reader,

Here, look at my Substack journey.

Looks like an adventure. Can you see the point when things changed, suddenly but softly? Sometime between 2021 and 2022? That’s the time I want to talk about.

Despite the suffering and helplessness unleashed by COVID in 2021, I was doing okay. Health was better than in previous years. I LOVED my job. Curating a curriculum with potent poems and stories, brainstorming with colleagues and mentors, and seeing beloved students grow.

Unlike many teachers, however, I was not happy going back to school every day. Teaching from home gave me the time to read and write. To process my emotions and digest my sensitivity load. Commuting, teaching from school, Monday to Saturday, left me exhausted.

I was becoming one of those people described in this quote:

“People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable clients. They make a mountain out of a molehill, fuss about unnecessary things, are too passionately in love with somebody who is not worth so much attention, and so on. There is a kind of floating charge of energy in them which is not attached to its right object and therefore tends to apply exaggerated dynamism to the wrong situation.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz

Do you relate to that? Not channelling our creativity for long chunks of time can have a deactivating, sickening effect.

Converting creative desires into creative decisions

When I sat with my bullet journal on New Year’s Eve, I realised, I must commit to my writing. I must populate my Substack. I wrote Joan Didion's quotes in rushed handwriting and made an aggressive list of reasons to write. “Nobody has or will ask me to do it. But inner calling bhi koi cheez hoti hai yaar,” I scribbled. It was time to convert my creative desires into creative decisions.

I started waking up earlier to write. Wrote a little on the way back from school. I spent entire weekends writing. Substack was a powerful container for my ambitious ideas and fledgling essays.

Writing with Weekend Writers of the London Writers’ Salon in Feb 2022

Creative decisions are life decisions

Slowly, I started finding readers. I stopped being secretive about my Substack. And yet, something far more important than Substack or writing or creativity happened. I got guts. I accumulated so much inner empowerment that by April 2022, I switched my city and job profile to shape a life around writing. Creative decisions turned out to be life decisions.

Next, I found a life-changing writing workshop, a writing group named ‘Bavaal’, and creative friends online and offline — making me feel less crazy and less alone. I continued to teach, but outside of the cage that school can be.

Writing and sharing regularly, or walking the creative path despite that stalker named shame and that shoe bite named fear makes us bolder. Committing to a creative platform changes our lives. Deciding to trust our trembling voice is not just soothing for ourselves, it also nourishes others.

A creative decision is like a deep breath.

The only fucking glitch is this — we have to take this decision over and over again. And I am the queen of indecision.

In my training to become a creativity coach, I explored many definitions of creativity. The one that struck me the most was by Eric Maisel, a pioneer of the field:

Creativity is not a talent or ability. It is the fruit of a person’s decision to matter…Once you decide to matter, you enter into a particular self-relationship; out of that self-relationship, a certain awareness state naturally arises; ideas are born; and the work of elaborating those ideas begins.

No wonder then, I can’t take this decision for others, even as a coach. I can’t ask anyone else to take it for me, as a forgetful creative. It is like a deep breath. I can't take it for you, and you can't take it for me. All we can do is remind each other.

How do we decide to be creative? How do we renew our commitments?

How do we “take” this decision over and over again? How do we renew our commitment to our practice?

I turn to these haunting words:

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
-Mary Oliver

To heal regret around unused creativity,

1. Give it power: I gather reasons about why my creativity matters to me, evidenced by what it’s done for me in the past. I notice my desire for it in the present, sometimes literally sensing it in my body, in my throat and in my fingers.

2. Give it time: I make room in my life. At any given time, there are a few time-hungry and energy-draining habits, patterns, and people, ready to be released. I allow myself to fluctuate between five minutes of writing a day to fifty. But I hold those five minutes sacred.

It does require a certain kind of privilege to pursue your creative path. But I always think of those who courageously choose creativity without having all the privilege and those, who, despite every privilege on their plates, succumb to their fears of not being enough.

All this is just to say, readers, that I am renewing my commitment to this space and others. I will water it with words, not hoard my ideas, or save the drafts for later, but I will spend all of it, show it, and glow in the beautiful awkwardness of being a creative human.

Love,

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Join the magicalNatasha Badhwar and me at the freshly launched Ochre Sky Writing Dates to tease out the small intimacies in our lives.