You Can Learn to Fiercely Protect Your Creative Practice

Even us timid people can be bold when it comes to defending our creative space.

A friend recently commented on how fiercely I protect my creative practice. The amusing image that popped into my head of myself armor-clad with sword drawn is at odds with how I see myself usually. I lack self-confidence, and I’ll avoid conflict at almost any cost. And yet she’s right. I defend my creative practice against anything that threatens to encroach on it. Somehow I’m bold and audacious within that space.

Part of my defense involves prioritizing my creative work over other things, but much of it is the mental and emotional labor that defending the inherent value of my creative work requires. When the main work of your life is something that doesn’t earn any money and doesn’t involve caring for others (e.g. being a wife/mother), you inevitably find yourself in a position of having to protect and defend against judgement (much of which is self-judgement due to conditioned cultural beliefs), incomprehension, or just plain indifference.

How is it that someone like me, so unassuming and even timid in general, is able to so fiercely advocate for her own creative practice? Moreover, how am I able to continue to do my creative work in the face of the often inhospitable world? I’m not a warrior, I don’t believe my creative work is all that important in the grander scheme of things. I’m not out to change the world with it. I just want to be happy, and my creative practice is how I ensure that on the day to day. Creative practice is my antidepressant, you could say. That alone is reason enough to protect it, but that’s not what enables me to do so. Likewise, I believe in the inherent value of my practice, but that’s not enough to engender my fierce protective instincts.   

What enables me is the space I’ve created around my creative practice, like a buffer zone between my work and the rough edges of the world. While I created that space out of necessity, I’ve come to find that I’m a different person there. Whatever boldness and audacity doing creative work requires in the first place becomes what I use to defend my creative practice against anything that threatens it. This could be something as small as an overbooked schedule. It could be something as big as a relationship that is using up the emotional energy I need to put into my creative work. In the creative entrepreneurship spaces I have recently found myself in, it often looks like explaining that for me creativity is a way of life, a way of being in the world. It’s not part of something else, not part of a business, for example (although business could be a part of creativity…perhaps). Creative practice is the thing around which all other things revolve. It is my center.

I think a creative practice requires this kind of fierce protection. Creativity and the time and space to do creative work are so easily encroached upon. Even robust practice can erode like sand from the repeated insistence of the gentlest waves. It can happen without us noticing. Life takes over, things come up, creativity can wait. If you don’t insist on that time and space and on the importance of your creative work (at least to you, if to no one else), it will inevitably languish.

You’ll feel strident, like you’re repeating yourself endlessly (I have to do my work. No, really, I have to do my work). You’ll feel selfish (I’m sorry, I can’t do that. I have to do my work). You’ll feel weird (I know everyone is doing [the thing everyone is supposed to want to do], but I need to do my work). All this is what following your passion and purpose feels like, I think. This is what it requires from you.

I didn’t develop my fierceness overnight. It grew as my practice did, in pace with it, organically over years. So don’t worry if you don’t feel fierce about your practice. I advise clients to find one way they can prioritize their creative work, big or small. Take one vacation day a month to do your work. Cancel one activity – better one that drains you than brings you joy, but either will do – and do your work. Once you begin to experience yourself prioritizing your creative work, you’ll grow in confidence that you can find your boldness, and that your work is important enough to protect and defend. You’ll begin to want to don your armor and draw your sword in defense of it. If I can do it, you can do it.