Welcome May!
Funny how as the weather gets lighter my theme gets a little heavier.
I will try not to make it too heavy I promise!
This is a theme with a lot of layers too, when you start to delve in.
It can be VERY personal in it’s meaning and relevance to you, just as it is to me.
So I don’t want to get too bogged down either – hmmm let’s see how I do!
On first glance we are taking a sidestep from where we were heading with our personal projects. We are moving from a practical headspace to the emotional.
I guess we had to go there at some point.
When we embark on something that is important to us – the emotional is always going to be involved somehow.
The question is how are we going to handle it?
My creative journey started from an emotional space.
It was me feeling down that made me grab the idea of bringing creativity to my life almost by my teeth. If I hadn’t been so low I don’t think I would ever has seen it as important because I wouldn’t have needed it so badly.
Finding this way of joy helped to lift me and anchored me better to my day to day.
I guess you could say (though I loathe to do so) it gave me purpose.
When we embark on this kind of journey we are never doing it in isolation.
We have day-to-day necessities and we have people who surround and love us.
The role of creativity is not to distance us from this but to be woven into the fabric of our life as it stands now.
With my situation it can be no other way.
It is unreasonable to expect life’s needs to stop needing us – this is a fact.
We always need to go as much to where life needs us as where our creativity leads. As a mother and a citizen there can be no other way for me and I never expect it to be. My journey walks hand in hand with this and sometimes the universe will give me more time with my work and sometimes work will slow a little to give time for more pressing needs. As frustrating as it may be sometimes, if I want to stay sane and kind this is a truth I have to accept.
That said (and this is where it gets interesting) – I am also a terrible fixer of things and have a strong need to know, that oversteps the boundaries of how involved in peoples lives I need to be. This is something that I have needed to check myself against. This is not something that other people put on me – this is something I put upon myself. I feel like I can tell immediately when something is not right for someone – I can feel it or see it in a glance. I thought this was a gift of mine, but as I grow older I wonder if I am not really using this as wisely as I could.
Because I didn’t have something strong to ground me in my own life I tended to be swept by other peoples emotions very easily. I thought in some way I was helping, but I am beginning to see that the person I was helping was me, in the distraction from my own stuff.
I am really happy to be there for someone – I see myself as a crap cook or practical person (I am always so stunned by people who do the really helpful stuff when people are struggling) – but the one thing I can do is listen and try to understand. This is something that I want to do, especially if it can even help. It helps me to feel closer to people and I am better with the big stuff than I am the small chat.
My mistake though is that when I leave, I seem to take a person’s feeling or situation onto myself and will let this live inside my head and my body well after the conversation has finished. This is my and only my issue. This is not what my friend has asked or expected of me and this is where my responsibility fails them. It is not my place to hold someone else’s private and highly personal feelings. People have shared themselves with me to create space to figure things out and they have trusted me with this. They do not need me adding to their problems by thinking that I am now leaving with their emotions and their hurt and burying them inside myelf. This is not helping them one bit and I am just figuring this out!
Thinking of it in this way has helped me hugely in allowing myself to still be there for my friends and my family without taking their experiences for myself. This lets me be a much better listener, supporter and leaves me with the energy I need to figure out my own stuff and to get on with my own work. My work has given me the anchor I need to know where I fit in the world and allowed me to be a much better support than coming apart when someone is suffering. SO I still can’t bring good lasagna or help with the cleaning, but I can be there for you and this time I have the perfect energy to be there appropriately. I have learned that your experiences are just that, yours, just as it should be and I can now walk with you through them as I have a much stronger footing than I used to and I have my work to anchor my own feelings so I won’t get swept out. You are good and I am good!
What sweeps you out to sea in your life?
How can you use your project to anchor you better?
Are you emotionally drained and is there anyway you can better protect that?
These are just some questions you might like to ask yourself if you feel that you are lacking in energy for the project that you love doing. It can make more space for you, your friends and family and your work.