creative return 🪐

for creatives struggling to return to the page/project.

In the creative process, pauses, breaks, and hiatuses are inevitable. in a culture that glorifies productivity and vilifies rest, it’s natural to internalize a sense of shame, guilt, and/or disappointment. but hibernation is our birthright as beings of nature.

The capitalist order needs us to see ourselves as machines separate from nature so that we’re easier to exploit. Coerced into identifying with machine-like qualities — productivity, efficiency, speed, linearity, control, efficiency — we are made to participate in our own dehumanization. If you want to explore this idea further, I recommend Tricia Hersey’s book, Rest is Resistance.

When it comes to creative breaks and pauses, the idea that we didn’t “plan” or intend the break alludes to the illusion of control this culture fosters within us. “I didn’t plan to take such a long pause, so it’s not right” is the at once self-punishing and self-aggrandizing perception of a being who has been taught to over-estimate their role in the universe, believing total control is possible and even desirable.

The declaration “you create your own reality!” has become endlessly popular on the spiritual/self-help/manifestation side of the internet. But the truth is, reality creates us just as we create it, in a figure of eight shaped paradox of existence. And many times, reality is more interested in being experienced than controlled.

A loving reminder that you are not a machine. We are not fully in control, we are nature. We are having a human experience that ebbs and flows and that is affected by all the ongoings of the world and our lives within and of it.

There is a gift in all of this. Amidst all the shame and guilt it’s hard to see it.

You have work you deeply care about that you get to come back and recommit to. Again and again. This project matters so much to you that it pains you to have left it for so long. You can focus on the pain of the time you lost, or the beauty of loving something so deeply, that it pains and betrays you to be away from it for too long.

The piece you are reading emerges out of this void. I’ve felt disappointed and uneasy at the time I’ve spent away from Substack after “falling off” my writing practice. But I decided that I could speak into that space; I could view it as generative rather than destructive.

I’m reminding myself that creativity is my birthright. I want to remind you of that, too. Your creative project is not asking you to punish yourself for the break you have taken. It has no puritanical values and invites you to return to it with a light heart, when you’re ready. When you do return to the page, and the magic of your craft finds you again, remind yourself it was always there, waiting patiently to be rediscovered.

🌻🦋🍄 What are you returning and recommitting to this week? What are you accepting you’re not yet ready to return to?

P.S., if you would like to explore this idea further, I have three podcast episodes that can support you: 21. the power of recommitment and return, 20. you are not a machine: why inconsistency is natural, 24. let it become/on embracing the creative unfolding, and 29. do what’s sustainable. You can listen/watch these on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.