Creativity is good for us. Making something is like the feedback loop telling us we are connected with the world and ourselves. It is our way of telling how we are doing. What we’re dealing with may not be all good. Creating is sometimes the way that we can process anxiety and trauma, and it is how we overcome the hardest and most painful things that we walk through in life. I have always turned to words in hard times, but others may choose art, movement, or music.

I have sometimes felt that creativity was a slave driver, asking everything of me, giving me so many ideas that I didn’t have time to achieve, and then when I'd spent thousands of hours on a project and finished it, making something that I was so proud of, I would get two years of silence from the industry. It stung.

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Perhaps Mary Oliver felt like this too as she was utterly surrendered to the artistic impulse in her life:

'It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all. There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.' Upstream

But if we look through a different lens, maybe we can see that perhaps living creatively does give back differently. What if creativity is our means of making our way along the pitch-black paths that life sometimes leads us on? What if it is our torch in the darkness?

When I found out that INFJs thrive on connecting disparate concepts, I was so happy because it is what I do and it makes me feel alive! INFJs are also empaths, with a strong sense of intuition, and deep concentration. These skills may not be particularly useful in general life, but as a writer, they are gold dust. I have huge empathy for my characters on the page, that is how I live their hopes and dreams with them, I have deep concentration, so I persist and persist for years on a single project, and my intuition makes little unplanned magical things happen in my writing that I love. (More on that next week.) But the thing is, writing a novel feels to me like the best thing I can do with my motley collection of skills. It is incredibly hard but is also the most me that I ever feel. I am reminded of this wonderful quote from Annie Dillard's The Writing Life:

'Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free...’

But as well as being a slave-driver, perhaps we can call our creativity a friend, holding our hand through life? Perhaps I can't articulate my emotions in speech, but they will come out in a poem. If I can’t get past a certain feeling, I journal about it. In times of reflection, I will write a poem. I realised recently that I have put myself in my latest book, Christopher, Running. I am Christopher, lost and running away in fear. I am Alice, waiting for him to come home, I am Esme, fumbling for the truth in the darkness. I didn't realise I was in this book until I re-read it again recently. When we tap into our child artist, we allow our subconscious to bubble up through the heavy layers of adult life, and come knocking with joy, playfulness, and healing.

My latest collection of poetry (The Ways in Which We Are Like Birds, ebook available to pre-order now) covers themes such as baby loss, childbirth, anxiety, the pain of losing a friend, and the pain of losing myself during the years of motherhood. But as wonderfully said in her book Bittersweet, all is not lost. In the darkest times of your life, your creativity will be there to hold your hand, and to pull you through; 'Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering.'

To live as a creative has no prerequisites for success. There are no hoops to jump through. If you breathe and you like making stuff, you are in the club.

What if, instead of waiting to be picked, like that pointing finger from the National Lottery campaign, you realise that you are already rich? What if you are loaded with creativity, and you have the ultimate power of choosing what to do with it? Are you going to make stuff and sell it on Etsy? Are you going to make showstopper cakes to enjoy with your friends? Are you going to take your painting seriously?

'Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.' Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love.

Your creativity is a gift, that you get to pour out as you wish. Self-publishing is becoming more and more commonplace. Self-released albums are the same. Get the power and put it back where it belongs, IN THE HANDS OF THE CREATIVE ONE!

Being in flow lights up my soul. It makes me feel I am doing what I was born to do. I found this little snippet from a journal today:

'What have I learnt today about creativity? It is that there is time. As soon as the children are asleep, I am lost to the world. Here I am sitting in half-light with the toys scattered around me, the curtains still open. I am lost in the flow.'

That flow is what we seek as creatives. It is that sense of oneness and rightness. You are alive, working out of your talents, feeding back to the world with all that you are.

Do you see your creativity as a slave driver, feedback loop, torch, or friend? (Or something else?)

If you lived as though you were 'rich in creativity', what would this look like? What would you do differently?

Be kind to yourself this week. Think of your creativity as a friend walking through your life with you. Reflect on how your creativity has helped you thus far in your life.

Thanks so much for reading Miners,

Elisabeth x

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