On creativity, uncertainty, and the parts we thought were getting in the way.
What I Am Expressing Is My Process
I recently was asked how I express myself so freely and stay inspired.
I replied by sharing that what I am expressing is my process – my inspiration arises from challenges both complex or simple, conscious or unconscious, and I have always expressed them through music, art, words and movement.
Sharing publicly has never been easy for me, though it might seem the opposite.
There are phases of feeling open and free and able to communicate and express, combined with phases of feeling shy, insecure, raw and introverted.
I’m thinking that expression includes all of it- not only the moments when something pours out of us freely, but also the moments when it stumbles, hides, whispers, or doesn’t quite know what it wants to say yet.
We can so easily imagine expression as the finished thing. The words spoken, the movement danced, the art made, the feeling finally understood. But what if everything that comes before that is expression too?
Maybe This IS It
I share this now because I know that at times we feel stuck or like we “aren’t there yet” in a place to express freely. But what if this is it, the birthing place of individual creativity itself.
Creativity does not give a constant outcome nor is it birthed from consistency in my experience.
It has roots in irrationality and in order to experience it, there has to be unknowns, uncertainties and even anxieties. Anxiety is our body’s way of expressing uncertainty sensationally and emotionally. All of this places our logical mind in a zone of feeling vulnerable.
Maybe the stuckness is not separate from the expression. Maybe the uncertainty, the awkwardness, the insecurity, the parts of us that would rather curl inward for a while are all communicating too.
Spending time alone in the company of yourself is powerful and has a way of cleaning things out, if you let it.
It can feel the opposite of calm and easy, pleasant and comfortable. So often things that evolve us do not feel spectacular like belly laughs and being loved up – but just like that feeling of having someone who knows you so well and loves you no matter what, and how that depth of connection was formed through many ups and many downs – each up and every down helps us to grow that deep kinda bestie friendship with ourselves.
It doesn’t have to be comfortable all the time. Let the awkward moments be felt too, the insecure ones, and the restless ones. The hilarious ones, the cozy ones – whatever wants to bubble up. Let the bubbles rise and pop. That is the definition of expression to me.
Roots in Irrationality
Expression can feel exposing at times. There is no formula that can guarantee what will come out of us, how it will be received, or even whether we will understand it ourselves.
It’s possible that in every work of art there are as many “mistakes” as there are “successes,” unless the process has been totally controlled by a logically produced formula in an attempt to avoid mistakes.
And when we try to edit the process too early, deciding which parts are acceptable enough to be expressed and which ones need to be cleaned up first, perhaps we also edit out some of the very raw material creativity is asking for.
The strange parts. The uncomfortable parts. The contradictions. The things that don’t make perfect logical sense yet.
They all have something to say.
The Full Spectrum
There is art in all areas of life, and therefore creativity.
When we are composing each moment from our individual raw process it can not NOT be creative and unique. Also tangly and containing the full spectrum of human polar-opposite possibility.
Maybe expression is less about becoming someone who knows how to express freely, and more about allowing ourselves to be exactly where we are in the process.
Open and free. Shy, insecure, raw, introverted and awkward.
We don’t need one expression to be more worthy than another, or wait until we’ve arrived at the version of ourselves that knows exactly what to say. There is no place we need to get to before we can express ourselves.
The parts we keep waiting to move through are not standing in the way of our expression at all. They are the expression. The raw material. The strange, tangly, contradictory ingredients from which something entirely our own can be concocted.
So perhaps the invitation is not to become more expressive, but to stop editing what is already asking to be expressed.
I love you,
Meghan xx