My journey with creative blocks and resistance

So, I'm halfway through the 12-week creativity course from The Artist Way by Julia Cameron. There are things I love about the book, and others that drive me absolutely batshit. 

But I'm not here for a book review. ( Not yet, anyways 🤣)

I'm here to tell you what happened in an exercise during week 5 - the week of Possibility - where the author asks us to examine our creative blocks, in what way they pay off for us, and who they really serve.

Rude, I know.

In recent weeks I've been struggling to get myself to continue a long piece of writing. At times it's felt like there are so many layers to my resistance, I'll never break through, no matter how much I unspool.

Alongside the creative block, I've also been wresting with some anxious attachment activation, which is part of my life-long struggle with complex trauma.

So I've felt very… unsettled recently. On a constant low level of dysregulation.

And this particular exercise in the book asked me to name “my favourite creative block”, and to "draw a cartoon of myself indulging in it.”

And THIS poured out of me:

Since my drawing stills are still on a learning curve, let me describe it: 

This is a drawing of me (with bows for hands and feet, of course) holding heart-shaped balloons that say “love” and “attention” (and yes there is an lgbtqia+ balloon, too).  And below my cartoon figure, amongst the wave of an ocean, here's what I wrote:

Wanting someone to love me is easier than committing to a scary (creative) dream.

Let me tell you. I did not expect this to pour out of me. And staring at this drawing, I realised:

My pay-off for staying blocked creatively is the familiarity of my patterns.  

This is how I’ve lived most of my adult life. There are so many parts of me that feel safer in the shadows of that fear because it’s so familiar. I have made the fear my home. I have made standing still and small a place where I can rest.

And you’d think that’s crazy. I can hear you thinking, Laurie, you can’t rest when you’re scared and ashamed! But this is how I grew up. This is how I learned to love. This is what I learned safety feels like from such a young age.

Shifting this pattern is the ultimate work of my adult life. Rewiring my brain to learn that embodied safety does not feel like shame and fear, is so fucking hard. And it’s worth every ounce of work and courage I pour into it.

Years after I started therapy, when I’d grasped the enormity of my childhood trauma, my lovely, brilliant therapist said to me, “when I met you, you were in functional freeze.”

And look, if you don’t know what means, I’m not here to bore you with technical nervous system jargon. What you should know is this: I spent most of my life doing things that were incredibly hard for me because I thought I had to. Because it felt normal. And I constantly felt awful as a result.

I've been unlearning all of these patterns over the last few years.

And it turns out that stopping myself from doing the creative work I really, really, really want to do, is part of this pattern.

I’ve let myself feel all this deeply in recent weeks. And you know what else I realised?

I am TERRIFIED of what happens if and when I do make my creative dreams a reality. And this fear isn’t just ‘what if it’s not good enough?’. 

It’s so much more complex than that. It's this:

What if I get what I want and it doesn’t feel as good as I hoped?

 If I get what I want... what the fuck comes next?

If a part of me isn’t constantly beating myself up for not doing what I really want to do... what am I going to be thinking all the time???

It turns out, if you’ve spent years hiding in darkness... that the light can feel just as scary.

But you know what?

I am fucking ready.

If you are too, I’d love to help 💜