Wallowing through the creative swamp
Of creativity, sacred pauses and knowing when a season is over.
And another one is done. I look at it briefly. My brain registers a vague sense of personal achievement as I absent-mindedly slide it into my recycled cardboard folder, alongside all the other illustrations. Two more to go. Although, deep down, I know too well that I only really have the energy, focus, and inspiration for…well, none.
I am coming to the end of my pregnancy and I fear the calendar hanging from the kitchen wall might drop flat onto the floor sooner or later, weighed down by the growing list of appointments, deadlines and time-sensitive tasks that crowd every slot of every week. The handful of weeks preceding my anticipated due date seem to have collided with an ever-growing avalanche of commitments that must be fulfilled “while I still can” — at least, this is what I tell myself, although I am not really sure about what “while I still can” even means, especially on days like today.
Sure, the renowned clunkiness of Italian bureaucracy and the hand of flu + shingles + various unidentified viruses that I have been dealt recently don’t help the situation. But the Earth must have been spinning faster on its axis over the past few weeks. There is no other acceptable explanation — I simply must have been running with less than 24 hours a day otherwise how is it that I constantly find myself chasing after each day, feeling frantic and frazzled from the moment I wake up?
My to-do list would make any type A’s eyes sparkle with satisfaction. Tick. Cross. Flag. On paper I look like a 37-weeks-pregnant champion of efficiency. Obviously the paper does not mention the several little lapses of mental lucidity that have occurred over the past few weeks: cake sitting in the oven for twenty minutes before I realized the oven wasn’t on, car keys involuntarily forced to spend the night inside the fridge, chargers confidently plugged to the phone but not into the power socket…
All the reasonable advice about the last month of pregnancy points to sipping nourishing smoothies and putting my feet up as much as I can — I am running in the opposite direction. Well, actually the smoothie part I am doing right.
Truth is, I love my life — I just need a break.
A while ago I wrote about how I felt like I had finally fallen into a comfortable balance between the pulls of mothering and creating.
That part is still quite true, actually — at least for now. What’s proving more challenging is finding the courage/peace of mind/strength to get out of my own way when the choice falls between creating and resting.
Right now I am a stay-at-home mother planning — planning? actively working! — to build a fulfilling creative work-life around my family life. This is the way I envision my life unfolding — with mothering and creating coexisting harmoniously within the same timeframe, within the same space. However, on some days even to my own sparkle-filled eyes this vision looks more like wishful thinking.
Perhaps it’s because I am not earning any money from my creative projects yet, so I feel insecure and selfish about staking a claim on my own time to pursue my creative ambitions — I can’t even contemplate taking someone else’s time by leveraging my family or my partner for reasons that range from “I don’t feel safe enough to talk about my projects” to “I feel guilty about asking him because he also deserves rest and time off”. Or maybe it is down to the fact that some things — like general household running and lovingly raising my family — simply travel on a faster and more direct neural pathway in my brain. All I know is that, in the face of life’s daily grind, my creativity too often gets easily and most resentfully pushed to the side.
As a result, I have become very protective of the handful of moments I get to create. To the point that I am willing to sacrifice rest and even my health for the sake of answering my inner fire’s irresistible siren call. Sometimes my fiancé, who is so supportive of my dreams (one of the many reasons why I feel so guilty about asking for his time), asks me “Why do you do this to yourself?”. Every day lately he’s been pleading for me to slow down and rest. Despite all his faith in me, it’s not easy for him to understand that I don’t do this to myself, I do this for myself.
But even I must admit it when I have reached my limit. Because while a part of me deeply cherishes drawing, painting and writing, sometimes I am thorn between gratifying my soul’s yearning to create and responding to my body’s plead to lie down and rest. And in moments like this, on days like today, my body’s argument is ever so persuasive. It’s so hard to acknowledge it — it feels like betraying myself.
In fact, there is another layer to this — one that is much more shameful for me to admit. Sometimes I don’t feel like creating. I just don’t. The need to rest and replenish becomes so strong that, maybe driven by some ancestral self-preservation instinct, my creative spring spontaneously cuts the flow and any attempt to push any creative task forward becomes heavy, ungratifying labor — it feels disappointing, exhausting and wrong. I feel lost and even my work seems to tell me that I don’t know who I am anymore.
Trying to sketch, paint or write when I’m in the swamps always leaves me drained and frustrated. Although it seems to happen less with unplanned, spontaneous writing — the stream-of-consciousness talking-to-myself type that, like in this letter, allows me to dive into the depths of my consciousness. It would feel different if I had to write adhering to a plan.
However, the truth about wallowing through a creative swamp is that things are not what they seem. If I keep fighting, frantic and stubborn like a trapped animal, restlessly plodding and sloshing through it trying to get out it looks as if I am surrounded but stagnant marshes of murky waters and treacherous quicksand. But if I just stand still, the cloudy swirls around me dissipate, the ground underneath me gradually steadies and what was a turbid bog of mud becomes a pool of crystalline waters — I can see myself again reflected in the silky shimmer of its surface. All I need is to respond to the invitation — drop into stillness, don’t pose resistance. Embrace the sacred pause.
So today, after the morning theoretically devoted to my creative work was derailed by a bunch of bureaucratic and logistical priorities — all equally unexpected and imperative — I decided not to tick the last two boxes from my list of illustrations I had planned to submit alongside the first three chapters of my book. Instead, when my daughter went down for her nap, I put my pajamas on, took myself to bed with my laptop and my dawn-shaded 2L bottle of water, and started writing this very piece to get my head — and my heart — around this decision and the feelings surrounding it.
Because I have been told over and over again that second children tend to come earlier, I had deliberately set myself a deadline for next week to submit everything to my editor, just in case. But the truth is…I am done with it. At least in this season of my life. Right now I have too much on my mind and even this incredibly beautiful passion project that I still adore is draining my internal resources. I just want to submit, get some feedback, birth my baby, and eventually get back to it, once the spark of inspiration lights up again. Because I know it will — it will turn back on when the time is right, when writing and illustrating the next three chapters will be the one thing that I want to do more than anything else to feel nourished, creatively fulfilled, like I am shining from within.
This last paragraph could become an entirely new essay on seasons and cycles of inspiration, and perhaps my own creative experience through the lens of my Human Design type. It may write it, one day. But not now. For now my mind is clear, my heart’s at peace, my 2L bottle has gone down by a third, my legs don’t feel like pins and needles anymore, and my soul has graciously accepted my body’s request to rest.
It’s all good. My creativity is still there, glowing and healthy. I can feel it as it flows fluidly inside of me, gushing out of my heart and into my system alongside my blood. Like the life-giving lymph it is. I am just resting. Embracing the sacred pause. Because this is all I needed.
I hope this letter inspires you to respond to your own invitations to embrace the sacred pause as they arise with newfound grace, ease and forgiveness towards yourself.
With love always,
Julia
More on this theme from —of rosemary and time:
Saffron flowers and permission slips. Of writing, mothering, and allowing space for life in between.
Sour apples. Of mindful baking, watercolors, and taking a walk: lessons from our orchard.
An autumnal bouquet. Of choosing to notice magic, making memories, and hazy photographs.
Other words you may enjoy:
Learning to love beyond fear. Of modern witches' trials and navigating toxic family dynamics: a little rant + asking for advice.
A mother's heart. Of loving, letting go, and holding on.
Unraveling generational patterns. Of mothers, daughters, and making my own mistakes.
Oh Julia, this is gorgeous. I had a huge book deadline the week before my baby was due and everything in my mind and body was shouting at me to slow down, yet I squeezed and squeezed, writing poor fiction in droves when I should have been writing raw journals about how I was feeling in those days leading up to my daughter's arrival. There is such an intuition to it. Using time alone to pursue something that lights you up so much, as writing clearly does, is never something to feel guilty about.
This is so beautiful! Brings me back to getting ready to birth my son, I remember needing to drop everything and rest. But that can be so hard to do, especially when it comes to our creativity and things that light us up inside. I hope listening to your body and what you need in this season brings you ease!