Creativity Doesn’t Have to be a Slog
When you think of engaging with your creativity, what do you feel in your body?
Do you feel dread?
Do you feel blocked?
Do you feel anxiety?
Do you feel fear? (Fear you won’t be good enough, fear you won’t “make it,” fear you won’t be celebrated, appreciated, seen?)
The secret capitalism doesn’t want you to know: engaging with your creativity is pure channeled magic. It’s a pleasure, and a joy.
When I typed that out, it felt controversial. It felt rebellious. What are we rebelling against?
So many of us are conditioned to believe that being creative is a chore, a slog. Creativity is hard, creativity is painful, creativity is treacherous.
Why?
And what if you can change the narrative?
I don’t mean to take anything away from you if that is your reality, or if that is really how engaging with your creativity feels.
What I am asking you to do is investigate that feeling. Where did this feeling originate, and who put it there? And, perhaps most importantly: why?
I’ve been there, too. Some days, I still am. Ever since I started writing again as an adult, I often feel this push/pull: I long to get words on the page and I dread sitting down to write.
For such a long time, creativity has felt like a battleground, my art a hard-won prize.
I used to think it was something I just had to “power through.” I’m sure you’ve heard all the familiar phrases:
“Get your butt in the chair.”
“Push through the slog.”
“Silence the inner critic that says this is terrible, I’m terrible, everything is terrible.”
This is capitalism doing its job. This is capitalism keeping you in fear. This is capitalism keeping you small. This is capitalism keeping you exhausted, burned out, and endlessly producing.
Why?
Because capitalism doesn’t value creativity. Capitalism doesn’t value art—unless it’s a means to some exploitative end. Capitalism doesn’t want you to feel rested and nourished—or for you to create from a space of leisure and abundance. Capitalism doesn’t care about you.
Capitalism wants you to stay tamed.
But you can rewild you relationship to your creativity.
I know, because I did it. To do it, I had to go *deep* underground. I spent most of 2020 not creating at all, and not really understanding why.
Using the tarot, I went all the way down to the roots of my process and excavated them. I really looked at the stories I told myself about writing and creating—and even more, the stories I told myself about not writing and creating.
I didn’t exactly know that’s what I was doing. All I knew was I existed in a creative void and that *something* was happening beneath the surface. Something magical and powerful and frightening and wonderful.
And after spending so much of the year submerged in my own intuitive waters, I began to rebuild my relationship to creativity from the roots up.
And one of the things I came back up to the surface with: writing is a joy. Writing is pleasure. Writing is play. Writing is pure creativity channeled through my fingertips.
It’s such a simple thing to say, but in my body? It feels radical. It feels like a revolution.
What does it feel like in yours?
I am Lisa Quigley (she/her.) I’m the author of the novella Hell’s Bells (Unnerving 2020) as well as the forthcoming Camp Neverland (Unnerving 2021) and The Forest (PMMP 2021.)
I am activating a prismatic counterculture of wild mystic intuitive creatives. My Substack offering Portals & Prisms is an intergalactic transmission to electrify your wild creative heart. Get in! 🛸🌈👽✨