how fear shows up
and learning to be bold *gulp*
One of our chief needs as creative beings is support.
Julia Cameron - The Artist’s Way.
I have been writing a lot about fear these last few weeks. Filling pages with words exploring what is happening in the body, insights from conversations, and moments when I was able to pause and listen to what was going in my heart and mind and not run.
This has been addling me in all kinds of somatic ways, and also there have been bright sweet peaks of insight into what the fuckity heck is going on and how to greet it. This has not made the panic, racing heart, and frantic thoughts disappear, but it has brought a little space around them and an easing.
I have avoided feeling the fear for a long time. In light of shocks and losses with such power to shatter and rewire the universe, I have been reluctant to engage with anything that has a hint of this kind of collapse. But it creeps in when I’m not looking. When I feel the familiar strain in the chest and the quickening of the pulse I will in true human style, find ways to either avoid it (which tends to exacerbate it) or pound it out with some physical activity (which can feel like self-harm).
I realise that a large part of why the panic feelings have been rising and rising this last fortnight is because I have been making things and now I have to share them, to tell people about them. I have to market my work. I have to, heaven forbid, sell my work to people. And this brings up all manner of icky feelings, and icky ideas about what sharing and selling is. To be seen. To take risks. To step outside of the winter cocoon. It brings up feelings that create thoughts of “who am I to…?” and pokes me back into “well, if I just keep on tweaking and making it better, I’ll get around to telling people about it soon… it’s just not quite ready yet.” But this is not really where I am at.
I am ready and longing to be seen, to grow, to explore. And the more I write classes and workshops and think about what I want to share with folks who are also on their creative paths (whatever unique flavour that looks like to you) I need to practice what I preach! And bloody hell do I want to. To absorb for myself what I know so deeply to be true for others: That we get to make, we get to create, we get for it to be imperfect, an offering in a moment in time, an ongoing enquiry, unfinished, unkempt, human.
We think our words are permanent and solid and stamp us forever. That’s not true. We write in the moment. Sometimes when I read poems at a reading to strangers, I realize they think the poems are me. They are not me, even if I speak with the “I” person. They were my thoughts and my hand and the space and the emotions at that time of writing. Watch yourself. Every minute we change. It is a great opportunity. At any point, we can step out of frozen selves and our ideas and begin fresh. That is how writing is. Instead of freezing us it frees us.
Natalie Goldberg
Shit needs to be shared! I want to share the things! I want to invite folks to the gatherings and classes. I am chuffed with the things that I have made, and I know the loving labour that has gone into them, and I know that they have the potential to support folks in their lives by creating meaningful and kind ways to make, write, noodle, explore, reflect, and act.
I know this because I have trialed again and again a bunch of rituals and practices over the years, and the ones that have “worked” are the ones where I have gotten to really listen to myself and what feels right for me in the moment. Not the things I believe I should be doing, the people I should be and ought to be like, and the “well they make it work, it must be able to work for me, no?!”
No. Most often, no.
Most often these practices and “doing” rituals are aimed at neurotypical brains. This is not my brain. I am not a repetitive, constant, rhythmic sort of brain and body. I am cyclic and curious, and will hop and skip and meander into all manner of ideas and projects.
What I have learned over the years is about how to create the conditions, the river banks to guide and nurture the heavy flow of creative longings and ideas.
I have learned that pausing, rest, and downtime, look differently to different people, and it doesn’t always look like lying down still in a dark room with whale music and incense. It rarely looks like that for me.
Root + Write
Rest + Action
Care + Creation
Creativity is cyclic.
We see it all around us. In the day and night, oceanic ebb and flow, the movement of sprouting buds to soft leaves, abundant green leaves, succulent fruiting, and dropping and dying back of organic matter into the ground to feed the next cycle. (For the plant enthusiasts and metaphor minders, this isn’t how every plant rolls, naturally, but in the natural cycle of things all plants and the elements live intertwined… so the metaphor still works. Phewph!)
And we are the same.
Our creative cycles are the same.
We need water and bright light at certain points to help us to grow, and at other times we need to mulch back into the ground and be still.
We live in a contemporary culture of constant push and demand.
Bright light illuminates our nighttimes and wild places (I have been trying to find a peaceful dark spot on the beach near me recently in the dusk hours but maaaaan are there a lot of street lamps and flood lights about).
Our work patterns stay pretty consistent through the seasons, even though our bodies and brains need different things at different points.
A voice in the fear that I have been paying attention to recently is the one that says “You can’t have meaningful, sustainable work that supports your cyclical physical and mental health needs. It doesn’t exist.” And this has been repeatedly true when working for other people, AND when I initially began working for myself.
I was trying to do it how I thought I should be doing it and how other people did it. I was proud of myself when I was '“on it” and producing, and a massive bloody arsehole to myself when I hit the deck and needed other things that felt “unproductive”.
And things are shifting. I am emboldened by the big feeling, systemic bullshit challenging, neurospicey, artists and makers around me. Through this winter time, stepping back from socials and being back on home turf, and the myriad of umpteen seen and unseen shifts, supports, changes, and things, something else is emerging.
And I want to share this emergence with all y’all.
There is something really, really bloody liberating in stopping resisting myself, my needs, and longings and opening myself up to the idea that something else is possible.
I am used to grinding and enduring.
I am used to worrying what other people think of me and being in hypervigilance (largely unconsciously) seeking approval and reassurance.
I am used to hiding parts of myself for fear that they are not ok or worthy, and over the years I have tended to and been tended by a community of humans who have brought me back to the life that is most true. I have been loved and allowed to return, by being as I am. Multitudinous, cyclic, moving, shifting, queer, divergent, messy, curious and human.
If anything is an emerging mission statement of sorts it is this. This permission granting and welcoming of another way.
Of being allowed to be, to gently and slowly and courageously listen and unfurl in our own sweet time. Firstly to ourselves and then outwardly in whatever ways feel sweet and kind and interesting, all the while making space for the retreat back to the nest to rest, digest and regroup.
But Kath, isn’t this all rather bloody self-indulgent when the world is on fire and shit is really fucking serious?
Yes, and no, and thanks for asking.
We need to indulge and reflect upon what is moving and living in and through us and make space for what brings us alive and that which stops us from doing so. We need to do this together. This fucks shit up. The more we can do this, the more permission we grant for others. The more we build connections and break down walls and divisions and polarities. The more we are able to come together and welcome the constantly shifting nuance of ourselves and others the more we grow the things we want to see more of in the world. In seen, understood and untold and unseen wats.
When we can do this - with all of the needed and deserved and warranted support and community - we are kinder people. When we can spend even a little time with our pains and loves we get to not shy away from this maelstrom of experience we see whirling around us in the world every day.
And no, it isn’t self-indulgent.
It is life-indulgent.
Deep, wise, whole, cyclic, feeling, physical, interconnected, wholly, sacred, life indulgent. When we can make space for this, we can make space for meaningful, care-full and consistent responses to what we see happening around us. Our creativity, simply as a tended to and expressed thing in any way is a spell cast for all of life. We may long to fill the world with art and words and song and offerings in response to the events and challenges and issues we are affected by and feel strongly about. We may be wanting to make space for just what the heck it is we are feeling and thinking and longing for, because it has been so long since we asked and made space for that.
To continue to roll in the unchecked self-violent belief of “I must always be doing it for the good of everyone else all of the time” perpetuates the stunting fear that we are fed by systems of oppression: you must obliterate yourself to be of worth to the world. This is especially true of women and female socialised folks, people of colour, women of colour, Black folks, queer folk, disabled folks, neurodivergent folks, poor folks, unwell folks, and any other identity of marginalisation and their intersections.
For those who experience the systems of power that were not built for them, there is an extra layer of obliteration that can occur with unsupported and unnamed pain and shame. I know this in my bones to be real, as a queer, health-spicey being, and I now have the support and love to shed more layers of it, with help from the privileges I do hold. There is medicine here, and without a doubt more challenges to come. We are mycelial strands impacting and affecting our networks. What we feed it matters.
I approach these questions and curiosities as a writer, an elemental colour maker, and a teacher. I am not a mental health professional or coach and I do not have all of the answers, naturally. I offer myself in service to the path of unfurling back to life, and I offer this outwardly to you as a slice of the creative care pie in your world. A spoke on the wheel. A leaf on the tree. A berry on the bush.
I invite conversation and exploration, and I welcome you as you are. I will name when things may veer into territory that is not my skillset to hold, and I welcome feedback.
Containers, boundaries, and river banks are great!
We can feel safer within them.
Settling on the page with pen and ink, in the timed writing prompt, in the process of making a small bottle of wild natural colour.
As always, writing unearths threads and joins dots and makes links in ways I could continue to dance with for hours. The fear that was nibbling away as I sat down to write is now emboldened by the slivers of rooted knowing in the words that have emerged.
At the moment, this is the practice of wooing the muse*, of rooting + writing, and of any other cheeky container that I am dreaming into being. The container, the river banks, the held space for enquiry and curiosity.
Finding that we already know the way, we have simply been insidiously conditioned to not trust our intuition.
We need comrades to walk the path with. Hello, friend. I’m here for that.
*I made some videos in my van this week talking about Woo The Muse and shared the first one on Instagram. Bold full facial move!
⋓ offerings ⋓
⋒ Woo The Muse: Online 2.5-hour community session, with resources and recording.
Sunday 25th February 3pm - 5.30pm
£15 - £45. Payment options are copiously available.
Rooting our doing in dreaming, and creating supportive containers for action. A blend of inner reflection and journal prompts with supportive plotting and planning.
⋒ Root + Write: An online 3-week community course for Spring soaked writing, with out-of-class support, resources and recording.
Wednesdays 6pm-8pm GMT. March 6th, 13th and 20th.
£42.50 -£125. Payment options are copiously available.
With full permission to write utter crap. Come and unfurl on the page and connect with words, longings and stories and the seasonal shifts.
Week 1: Beginning: rituals and rooting.
Week 2: Getting into the flow and exploring what we want to write about.
Week 3: Revisiting our words, without being stifled by the inner critic.
With love,
-KJ
◬ good things ◬
◬ Netflix’s series of the David Nicholl’s book One Day.
◬ More Little Simz brilliance:
◬ Joy as a Practice of Resistance and Belonging with Ross Gay. A glorious conversation about the abundance of the lineage of seeds that grow the plants, the delights available to us in loitering space and the preventions we encounter.