Dear Reader,
For this fortnight’s paid subscriber post I am sharing an excerpt from a booklet of short essays I wrote called Toehold: Getting from Here to There. Given that I couldn’t write a post for free subscribers last Friday I am making today’s post available to everyone.
Toehold is very dear to me. The essays are about holding onto a sense of creative identity during challenging times; to write them I drew on my own life experience. The following excerpt is the introductory note.
Once again, in a life full of ghastly little ‘adventures’, I have been dealing with some challenging circumstances. Happily, things are improving. Next week I will be moving house. This will go a long way to helping me feel more secure, both in terms of finances and personal safety. Moving is expensive, so it would help me immeasurably if you could buy a copy of Toehold, subscribe to this Substack, buy me a Ko-Fi, or even just share this post on your socials (social media algorithms hate me!).
In the meantime, enjoy reading the excerpt below.
Many years ago – I think it was when I was an undergraduate at university – I had a vivid dream that has stayed with me my whole life.
In the dream I was playing myself, so to speak. You know how in dreams you sometimes look different, or are a different age or gender to your waking self? Well, in this dream I was exactly as I was in my waking life at the time.
Except, single and childless, I was accompanied in my dream by two young children, say eight or nine years old. These children were identical twins, a blonde boy and a girl. In the way of dreams – oddly specific about some insignificant details and expeditiously hazy about others – it was never made clear as to whether I was the twins’ mother, sibling, aunt, guardian, babysitter, or friend. But it was somehow clear that they were bound to me and in my care.
The dream was brief, and the whole action showed us climbing a mountain so steep that it was practically vertical. The cliff face we were scaling was damp and covered in fog and lichen. I knew that we were a long way from the bottom but nowhere near the top. We were not equipped with any rope or other gear but were just groping from one toehold and fingerhold to the next. Every now and again I would look back to see if the twins were keeping pace with me, and they always were, uncomplainingly and with their little faces quietly frowning in concentration.
The odd thing was that, although not a comforting or fun dream, it was far from being nightmarish or panic-inducing. The twins and I were not in a dither about being in that predicament, we were just methodically and calmly inching up the mountain, one toehold at a time.
I later found out that in dreams mountains symbolise challenges to be overcome and a child represents ideas or things in development (literally – ‘brainchild’). So, I interpreted the dream to mean that I was tackling challenges but – or maybe by – taking my brainchildren with me as I did so.
Why has this dream remained in my memory for nearly three decades? I think it has continued to resonate in different ways relating to my career choices around pursuing a creative vocation in one way or the other during my life.
Creative work, which for me took the forms of performance, choreography, writing, and arts management, is often depicted in the movies as being a sudden gushing outpouring of inspiration, a sweaty and feverish burst of genius.
I only wish.
Often, the process of making creative work is laboured, vague, frustrating, and messy. It can, of course, be the opposite: satisfying or fun or uplifting (and if it isn’t then you need to change something about your practice). But alongside this can often lie exhaustion, disappointment, or bewilderment.
Extracting stuff from your imagination and then making it into a tangible outcome is intense. A lot of intellectual, emotional, and imaginative slipping and sliding happens while you flail around trying to find something solid to grab onto. Each small handful of inspiration or insight you take hold of is precious and leads you to a moment of precarious security as you look for the next one. It is a process of finding the toeholds inside your own inner life, as you grope your way towards bringing your work to a completion.
So, the mountaineering analogy works for creativity as a process belonging to your inner life. But what of the external world – the part of your existence that centres around the material and social obligations that affect the way you live? These might include the needs or interventions of the other people with whom you share your life. Or your work and the conditions under which you do that. And do you have access to money and time and the other resources required to pursue being creative in the ways that call to you?
So many of us have good intentions to make creative work – to start that blog, write that book or those poems, join that art class, get back into performing, get back into practising the guitar. So many of us yearn to be more creative than we are, to answer or connect with an instinctive call coming from inside us. And so many of us… somehow don’t get around to it. We are often too tired, too distracted, too busy with the kids, the housework, the job, favours, volunteering, caring, cleaning, shopping. We look in our calendars and spot a time that looks free but, somehow magically, never is when the day arrives.
We squish our creative activity around the edges of a frantic life that society demands we lead, a life packed with distractions and competing priorities that splinters our focus and drains our energy. For some of us, alongside the busyness, lies the challenge of dealing with insecure or low income that results in financial stress and also means that our creative process is under-resourced. And some of us have to contend with unsupportive people who sap our confidence or sense of positivity.
Shifting this stuff so that it feels under control enough so that we can find time for creative activity, including deep thought and fallow times, can be very hard. For many, there will be periods of our life where it might feel nearly impossible (for those of you who are reading this with a toddler in the house, I’m thinking of you specifically as I write this). So how to keep that inner creative life alive? It can be about finding those moments where you can commune with it when you can, however you can: a Saturday afternoon doing some writing; doing some background reading or research on a device during your morning commute; doing some sketching during your lunch hour; picking up some skills during the odd workshop or via a self-paced online course.
And sometimes life is such that even attending to these small activities feels hard. To have your efforts continuously frustrated can, over time, have a diminishing effect like the slow drip of poison into a healthy system. Your creative self can start to fade from view or blur around the edges. Like a pathetic ghost, it can start to back into the shadows and only exist in the periphery of your inner vision. The idea for your novel or composition or play can start to lose the glistening allure it had when it first charged into your imagination; as each day passes working on it can seem more and more impossible and, correspondingly, this frustration can tarnish the concept and your sense that you were ever able to pull it off. It can all just start to look fanciful.
What happens then? Do you resign yourself to never doing that creative work? When that innate part of yourself – that part that dreams and imagines and senses – churns out its ideas, do you delight in them, explore them, nurture them, and trust them? Or do you deny them focus and attention, let them fade out, believing that they are useless and silly brainfarts?
How do you keep in touch with your creative identity and keep believing in it as a vital – essential – part of yourself? How do you maintain the confidence or curiosity in developing the skills and talents required to make creative work? How do you maintain the hope that sometime, somewhere you will have the time and energy and resources to do this?
When material life exhausts, disorientates, or demeans you, how do you stop that poisoning the curiosity and audacity with which you need to experiment, learn, and tinker. How do you sustain the kind of effort, curiosity, and desire needed to risk vulnerability and failure?
Since I climbed that dream mountain, I have had many career-adventures both within the arts industry and out of it. I have been a dancer, choreographer, dance teacher, director, English teacher, arts manager, project manager, actor, community centre manager, community development worker, workplace trainer, events manager, and writer. Some of this work was directly centred around artistic practice, which usually meant I spent every day immersed in creative activity but not earning much money and never having enough resources. Sometimes I spent my days not doing creative work but earning a stable wage from a non-arts related day job and, subsequently, never having enough time for my creative practice. As an arts manager it was my privilege to work with artists from all art forms and to witness their approach to maintaining their creative practice. And during my life I have become fascinated by how people do this, how they get the right balance between the conditions imposed by their external and material lives and how they try to be of service to the creative yearnings of their inner lives.
We live in a world that mitigates against creativity. Too many people are denied the time and energy to make manifest their creative selves. In extremis, how do people cling on to this thing – both a need and a characteristic – that is so innately human but so denied by modern society?
I was lucky to start out working in the arts industry. My younger self spent her formative years learning about her creative identity.
This meant that when I came to work outside of the arts industry, in ‘day-jobs’ that paid the rent but left little time or energy, I still knew how to cling onto my sense of creative identity and find ways of chipping away, even minutely, at making art and keeping certain imaginative, intellectual, and psychological muscles limber. This left me poised to hop straight back into churning out creative work when I did get the time.
Over the years I became used to rummaging around my tired or distracted brain for mental toeholds that helped me keep inching up the mountain, even slowly. These toeholds took various forms: attitudes, values, little mental exercises, psychological prompts, tricks played on my own mind to keep my creative-self believing, striving, hanging in there.
These toeholds did not mean that I had climbed a whole mountain, but they did give that moment when the scrabbling and reaching stopped, where I could look around and consider my next move, where I knew that I had moved a few inches towards where I wanted to go.
It is some of these that I want to share in Toehold.
Thank you for reading!
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