When you face creative obstacle after creative obstacle
Don't push the river
Hi beautiful people,
Spring is here—it is, it is! In step with the buds, I’m also slowly emerging.
A few of you have checked in about how my experimental retreat from being so digitally embedded/connected/consumed has been. A video update is coming soon.
March was rocky—rapid, then time suspended, then it folded up and I don’t know where weeks went, and now it’s smoothing out to a more familiar form.
Here’s the thing: I’m committed to being a person who shows up for my creative longings and my visions in the flux and intensity of everyday life doing its everyday stuff.
This is my forever practice.
Years back, I thought this meant being mechanically consistent (an aim I could never reach no matter my willpower or sneaky ‘brain hacks’). Even with a contracted capacity, I tried to push through. I’ve let that go. I trust the rhythms of life and the power of my stubborn persistence.
March was just one of those months where most of my energy was needed outside of work, and my capacity to show up for writing and creating was dim. I felt defeated in a way that I haven’t felt in a long time.
I also felt supported through it all, including feeling supported in the process of supporting loved ones in more acute ways. It was something to realize how much the feeling of defeat has diminished in my life and the feeling of support has grown (a negative correlation, no doubt).
I’m naming all of this in case the same is true for you, in case you have also been in the thick of it. These times are devastating. Sometimes persistence in living a life that feels true to you looks like taking the long view and prioritizing rest. Sometimes it looks like sourcing support in ways that make you bite your nails. Sometimes it looks like trying something totally new.
Even though this culture lauds linear growth and standardized notions of productivity and output, uncertainty and disruptions are the stuff of life.
Accepting this has made self-judgement plummet, priorities sharpen, and increased my ability to work with what is the case—creatively, resiliently—instead of against it.
(This, by the way, is exactly what practice together in Pivoting Toward Wholeness)
One of my Organizing Principles for 2025 is IMPERFECT EXPRESSION
(more on “Organizing Principles” soon)
In the rockiness and the resistance, that’s my compass.
I’ve been keeping this in mind as I practice settling back into the flow, sifting through archives of my work, preparing for the return of Pivoting Toward Wholeness this May (the last cohort was fabulous and everyone is taking it for a second round).
Imperfectly and expressively, I’ll be in your inbox in the upcoming days and weeks with gentle musings that I hope are immediately inspiring and useful to you and support you in how you navigate your days as a creative, deep-feeling person.
Today’s Gentle Musings is one from the archives. It’s for when you are in the middle of showing up for what you care about and it’s rough sailing. This is a story of creative vulnerability and staying with it, with compassion.
Also: I’m not going in to refine and retell this story even though I’m scrunching my nose and my shoulder and my hands with the urge to—including the very first sentences—but I’m not! Because… IMPERFECT EXPRESSION. Alright, enjoy.
On a Monday in late September 2020, I sat down to film the introduction video for my Patreon page after attempting to film it in August. This is a snapshot of what happened, and I’m sharing it because hurdles in creativity never fail to feel individual, and yet they are almost always a collectively shared experience on some level. Creativity is a lot like loneliness in this way.
Quick backtrack to August: so begins the comedy of errors
I prepared the night before and tried filming in the early morning in our courtyard—it was my first time having a patio space and I figured the fresh air and nature would calm the bubbling anxiety.
A few minutes into filming, there was a clamor of construction. Trying to stay patient, I recorded when there was a pause in their work. I thought, this is a test of my patience, but honey, I’ve studied.
At about fifteen minutes in, stumbling on my words, getting tripped up and doubting about even having a Patreon page, jackhammers enter the scene.
I took some deep breaths and waited, only until a police helicopter started flying overhead… for some reason *ahem inflated police budget* there are constant non-medical helicopters in this city.
So, I move the filming set-up inside into my apartment, a teeny studio without the greatest backgrounds. It’s beautiful and homey, but every background setting I could find was busy, fine for a casual video but not the introduction to a Patreon page.
The area I could film in was also contingent on the sunlight from the window, so I settled on a space that showed my kitchen sink and fridge in the background and thought, whatever, this is an at-home production, this is what is happening…
While filming clunky takes, my cat jumped on the counter, highlighting how much I absolutely, under any circumstances, do not want a kitchen sink and fridge in the background of my introduction video.
Many camera pivots and shots gone awry, and I was a puddle of frustration and disappointment. My script was memorized at this point and came out dry and uninspired.
Cut to Monday well over a month later—a new day to try again.
As I went to pull up the script, it was nowhere to be found. My nerves started to build that this would be another disappointing attempt at stepping outside of my comfort zone. But honey, I’ve studied. If anyone is creatively stubborn beyond reason, it’s me.
After the script was quickly re-written, my freaking tripod broke.
I empowered my inner creative warrior, grabbed some tape, and kept moving forward. After watching the videos back, I quickly realized that the microphone was broken: the sound would fade in and out as if on a dial.
Once again, I tried to hold steadfast to making this work and pulled out a back-up phone to film on. It wasn’t charged because I hadn’t anticipated using it, and the low battery notification popped up three times during the filming process, interrupting the video and creating a circumstance of trying to beat a 5% battery.
In that time, I managed to get the take and decided to put away the phone without re-watching any of the footage. By the end of it all, I just felt like shit.
If you have tried to bake an ambitious recipe that came out soggy and sad, then you surely know this place. It’s those moments when our attempts don’t work out and yet, there’s clean up to be done.
Cue the shame, exhaustion, hopelessness, futility, and pity.
The same can happen for learning a language, knitting, writing, or any competency that we try to build: there’s the build up of showing up for it, squeezing it in or delegating tasks so that you could carve out the time, and you give your all, and—sideways it goes!
Platitudes of creative encouragement to 'fail better!' and 'fail faster!' feel hollowed of their value in those instances. Failing just burns.
Maybe failure is too strong of a word to tag to this, although it surely feels that way. Sometimes being a beginner is an area of naive delight. The possibilities are laid before you! Your lack of skills can garner incredible results! Just look at kid’s art—how many artists are trying to re-embody that level of creative impulse, intuition, and accidental brilliance?
In that moment of feeling soggy and sad myself, I had the thought: If this takes SO much time and so much effort, sometimes only to take what feels like backward steps, is it really worth pursuing?
All evidence seemed to say no.
Do you live with this thought, too?
And this one: Aren’t the things that we are ‘suppose’ to be doing feel easy… natural?
A week later, it was time to re-watch the footage and venture into editing. I’ll keep this part short:
Eight apps and four free desktop softwares later (including computer updates, crashes, and learning curves, ahhh!!!), I finally had an edited video.
I also have this story to share because, as it goes (half rolling my eyes in annoyance and gratitude), the journey offered so many more gems than just having a completed video. Which, for the record, includes some rough edits left in as a memento of my efforts.
After the day of filming, I took a good nap and filled up on lemon water. When I caught my mind getting snagged on how others might receive the video and what their experiences might be, I went in and nurtured my fear instead of taking off with the thoughts. Again and again, I went in with care. Like Thich Nhat Hanh says: I care about this work and I care about this suffering.
Every time I show up for filming, I’m learning to relax into letting anyone who sees my videos, audio episodes, or writing to have the sovereignty to think and feel whatever they do, while upholding my own energetic boundaries. It's simpler that way, honors compassion, and actually creates the space for creative juice—which is so much vaster than what we can plan for—to flow and express.
Some of my suffering in the tedium of filming was because of being fixated on the progress that I was making. There was doubt that this was time well spent.
And the reminder, the opportunity in this completely agitating scenario, was to keep the process close to heart. The process. I'm coming to believe that so long as the process is what you’re focused on, progress happens. And! Even better still, progress gets to express itself in the ways that it does, free from our preconceived notions of how it ‘should’ be. There's that creative juice!
Part of staying close to the process, which is really a process of integration, is staying in the current: the current of creation, of Life… Really staying there. Setting the intention and making the choice to return again and again to that place.
And while we’re there, remembering to not push the river. Flow doesn't take well to force. What I’m speaking to is a responsive balance between persistance and surrender.
After all, we don’t willpower ourselves through revelations.
I started to push the river as a push back to feeling defeated. I pushed the river to prove my resilience to myself. In those moments, I craved completion and strove for an inarticulate definition of success. In the swirl of that momentum, my method of trying to break through the barriers was through force and sheer will.
But it doesn’t really work that way, or maybe it does in a certain sense, but that’s exhausting, isn’t it?
The breakthroughs can really get moving when we show up, when we stay in the current to our fullest capacity, keeping our mind and heart on the process, and from that place, have the courage and trust to rest back into the process.
We create the space—allow the space, really—for things to go differently than planned. For fresh interventions to arise. For our intuition to guide us in the process.
Sometimes there’s grit alongside our best efforts and sometimes the whole thing feels a bit scrappy, but we can set the intention to stay embodied and to keep an agreement of gentleness with ourselves above all else.
Either way, we can always expect the creative process to humble us to our core and then smile when it surprises us with ease.
xoxo
Maggy
THANK YOU FOR READING.
Thank you for honoring your creative stirrings.
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