Where Creativity Resides: Making Space For Your Essential Creative Self

What are we missing because of our rational conditioning?

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

(This is a follow-on post to last week’s. I guess I just wasn’t finished with this topic!)

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how our socialization into the rational paradigm of understanding the world results in negative outcomes that we’re largely unaware of. In last week’s post, I looked at how our societal preference for rational cognition can impede creative thinking. The reasons for this have to do with how different, even contradictory, rational and creative modes of cognition are. For those who are very entrenched in the logical, analytical, causal model of rational thinking, the ambiguous, often even paradoxical, nature of creative thought goes against everything they’ve been taught about how the world works and what comprises intelligent understanding. Today I want to explore another pitfall of exclusively using the rational paradigm to understand the world: an associated tendency to overlook information that cannot be understood via a rational approach.

This is an ironic pitfall, because what I’m talking about here is a version of the confirmation bias, a type of cognitive bias that rationalism is very keen on eliminating. A confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out or only recognize information that confirms previously held beliefs. A rational approach to creating knowledge about the world has failed if it falls prey to confirmation bias. The problem is that the rational approach is itself a biased perspective, so inevitably it can only be used to understand phenomena that adhere to rational standards. Not everything does.

We know this already, of course. Scientific approaches to understanding human behavior, for example, are imperfect, because human beings can be irrational. Behavioral economics is a field that arose because older models of humans as rational “utility maximizers” were failing to be sufficiently explanatory. It is possible to study irrational aspects of our world through a rational approach. What concerns me, however, are the things we are not even aware of because of our rational cognitive bias. We tend to dismiss out of hand anything that cannot be rationally explained. And no, I’m not talking about paranormal or similar phenomena here. I’m talking about what our intuitive, creative natures already understand: that reality is pure potentiality and paradoxical. As conscious beings we live in a world that we must at least partly understand rationally, but our creative selves reside in that plane of pure potentiality and paradox.

Creativity exists outside of time. It is nonlinear and anti-analytical. Sure, we can practice creativity within a rational framework, but it will only be a shadow of itself, a projection on a screen, a second-hand version. If you feel like you are forcing your creative practice, it’s because your rational mind has you in a stranglehold. Creativity can feel free, easy, and joyful. It can feel life-giving, life-sustaining. It can heal. But it needs free reign to do that.

The rational mind likes things to be onerous, because rational thought is itself effortful and time-consuming. But creative thought is light and lighting fast. It works by flashes of inspiration, not linear, progressive reasoning. For those flashes to occur, there must be space. You must let your creative self reside in that plane of pure potentiality, the place of nonsense and no-time. And that’s scary. It goes against everything we’ve been taught is right, correct, sane, beneficial, rational. The good news is that you don’t have to make all the space for creativity to shine. Just a little bit of space. A crack. Creativity is like water or light – it is irrepressible, and it will find that crack. But these cracks aren’t where creativity gets in. It’s where the creativity that already resides in you gets out, and shines its light into the world.

I’ll leave you with a passage from Alan Lightman’s novel Einstein’s Dreams. Lightman is a theoretical physicist who was one of the first people to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and humanities at MIT. Einstein’s Dreams is a collection of mini-essays about the nature of time, and each one describes a dream Einstein has about a world where time works in unique and sometimes non-rational ways. In one, causality gets mixed up. Cause and effect are erratic and random, effect sometimes occurring before cause.

Einstein dreams: In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?

In this world, Einstein dreams, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective… It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.

Do Intuition and Creativity Use the Same Cognitive Processes?

Enhance creative capabilities by learning how to stop applying the rules of rational cognition to your process.

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

As an INFP and/or INFJ (I’m not sure which I am!), I’ve become used to using the terms intuitive and creative to describe myself. I always saw these two skills as inherently different from each other. As I’ve learned more about the workings of creativity, however, I’ve come to understand that the reason intuitive and creative abilities are often co-occurring is because they function in strikingly similar ways. In fact, creativity may be simply a variation of intuitive cognition. If this is true, we are repressing our creativity when we insist on rational approaches. If you are struggling to tap into your creativity, questioning your socialization into rational, analytical styles of thinking is a good place to start.

Both intuition and creativity rely on similar cognitive functions: pattern recognition and analogical thinking.* Intuition is an understanding you arrive at when your brain subconsciously compares many different past experiences and knowledge, pulls out relevant pieces of information, and synthesizes it all into a new understanding. This manifests as the “a-ha” moment intuitives often talk about. Creativity is the ability – often at least party unconscious – of being able to compare disparate pieces of past experiences and knowledge and put them together in unexpected ways to produce a novel understanding, solution, or product. You can see how the processes are similar, though their purpose and the conscious experience of them may differ.

Intuitive/creative ability is actually a kind of intelligence, though in our society we don’t really recognize it as such because we have a very limited view of intelligence. We categorize it as a facility with logical, deliberate, and conscious thinking. In this rational perspective of intelligence, the latter is particularly important: you must be able to explain how you came to a certain conclusion through a step-by-step, linear process of reasoning and/or evidence confirmation. Intuitive/creative intelligence does not allow for such explication, as it is unstructured and nonconscious, nor does it adhere to the rules of logic. It is therefore categorized as something other than intelligence.

Intuitive/creative intelligence is native to human beings just as is our capacity for rational thought, so in that sense we all have intuitive and creative abilities. But because we are taught that it is a “lower” form of cognition, untrustworthy, and irrational, we grow up discounting it as a valid way of experiencing and understanding the world. This can have profound effects on our ability to be creative. We can enhance our creativity by not applying the rules of rational cognition to our intuitive/creative cognition process. But how? Let’s look at a few of the big no-nos of the rational approach, and why they work directly against intuitive/creative thinking.

Centering yourself in the knowledge formation process.

The major tenet of the scientific approach, which represents our highest form of the rational process, is that you must remove yourself from your research. Your job is to be an unbiased conduit of knowledge formation and communication; to discover objective truths. The whole point of scientific study is to create universal knowledge that is verifiable through a replicable process, i.e. scientific experiment. Intuitive/creative cognition does not do this. It results in knowledge that is neither explicable (because you arrive at it largely through unconscious thought) nor verifiable or replicable. It is based on your personal experiences of being yourself in the world. You must center yourself when using intuitive/creative cognition – and the knowledge you create is valuable because of your personal bias.   

Using feeling as a method of knowledge confirmation.

It goes without saying that rational approaches to knowledge formation do not use personal feeling as a method of verification. A scientist does not decide which results are accurate based on their feelings. There is no “I think this is true because it feels right” in science! But in the intuitive/creative cognitive process, feeling is the measure that is used to identify what is true – true for you. What challenges us more than any other thing about using the intuitive/creative approach is that it results in knowledge that may only be true for us, and not match what is true for others. Our societal preference for the rational approach tells us we should distrust such knowledge because we are not able to validate it externally.

Trusting knowledge that cannot be verified.

In rational models, there is a correct (i.e. objectively correct) answer; in intuitive/creative models, there is no such thing. Exactness or accuracy are not evaluations that are relevant to intuitive/creative knowledge, but our conditioning in the rational approach causes us to use those evaluations anyway. This leads to second-guessing ourselves and what we know, and it can also lead to us losing confidence in our creative output. Think of it this way. How ridiculous would it be to think that getting an almost right answer to a math problem is totally fine if, say, you’re designing a space shuttle? Reverse that: it’s equally ridiculous to try to apply such rational precision to intuitive/creative thinking. We cannot judge a work of art, for example, by how accurately it represents reality or whether it was created in the “correct” way. Release your intuitive/creative cognition from such shackles! There is no “right” answer in any objective sense. Intuitive/creative intelligence is about trusting yourself.

We are trained to distrust and discount information and knowledge that come to us through a non-rational, i.e. intuitive, cognitive process. But if intuition and creativity are similar types of cognition, we are also inadvertently repressing our creativity when we try to apply the rules of rational thinking to our own understanding and experience.

*This essay is partly informed by a paper entitled Intuition and Creativity (Ul-Haq, 2015; open access). It cites a lot of the research on this and related subjects and is a good place to start if you want to delve in deeper.

Creativity Is the Antidote to Burnout: A Creative’s Manifesto for 2021

We don’t need anyone’s permission to be creative.

I coach clients who can’t seem to connect with their creative potential, often because of burnout. They know they’re creative people, or think they could be, or maybe they were one in their past life, but for some reason their creativity engine is broken. They feel called to create, but can’t make it happen. And it feels awful. It’s like having a terrible itch under your skin you can’t scratch – or worse. Creativity is an essential need of every human being, whether we recognize it or not, and without it our lives cease to be as meaningful. And for some of us, creativity is one of our primary needs. Burnout is an emergency for creatives, because when we lose our ability to be creative, our purpose in this world is gone. Life becomes like a living death.    

But when we try to seek out help, we run into a big problem. Most of the info out there on burnout is useless for creatives. It’s surface-level and it’s mostly saying the same thing. We live in a world of copious information that is all essentially a copy of itself, replicated over and over in the digital dimension through articles, blog posts, videos… Our info reservoir is cluttered with crap. This was my problem when I started looking for help with my own burnout. None of the available information resonated with me. It was all just more of the same. Please just stop with the four things I can do to cure my burnout! That stuff doesn’t work, at least it didn’t for me. The reason is that we don’t understand what burnout is. Not really.       

In its most severe form, burnout is the death of our creative capacities. And for creatives, it is often the result of years of living out of touch with our creative center – as we are required to do in order to “succeed” in conventional ways. So burnout, in creatives, is both caused by, and causes, this loss of ability to be creative. Note that I am not talking about what is typically labeled “creative burnout” here. Creative burnout is a type of fatigue that results from overwork in the creative realm, and taking a break to recharge can help. The kind of burnout I’m talking about results from a disconnection from the creative self; it happens when we have not allowed ourselves to live creativity-centered lives.

This kind of burnout is a whole-life phenomenon, and that’s why it can’t be solved in the way advised in all those burnout resources. You can’t just take up watercoloring and hope that it will fix your existential problem. Before you develop a specific creative practice, you have to open your life up to creativity – fit a creativity lens over your perspective, if you will. A solution to whole-life burnout is a whole-life creativity. What creativity is, at its core, is a type of problem solving. It’s figuring out how to do the stuff of your life in a way that suits you and inspires you. At an intellectual level, it’s figuring out answers to what puzzles you and arouses your curiosity. Creativity as a lifestyle is adaptive, responsive, and open-ended. It’s a way of being in the world.

You can’t develop a satisfying creative practice from the outside in. Without a connection to your creative source, that creative engine at the center of your existence, you will only ever be playing in the shallows of your creative potential. I wrote for years this way, and I turned out some good stuff I’m proud of, but it wasn’t a fulfilling practice. It wasn’t until I developed a sense of myself as a creative being, rather than just someone who does creative stuff sometimes, that I began to feel like I was tapping into my potential. I went from struggling to come up with a single creative idea to finding creative possibility everywhere, all the time, as if creativity is part of the very fabric of the universe. And it is – at the quantum level, our universe is one of infinite potentiality.

So let’s make this new year, 2021, one of tapping that creative potential. We can start by accepting that we have a right to be creative, not just in some things, but in all things. And by acknowledging that we aren’t just people who do creative things – we’re creative beings from the inside out. And finally, by respecting our own creative natures through internalizing the fundamental truth that we don’t need the permission of anyone outside of ourselves to be creative. We already have permission. We just need to open our eyes to it. We are creatives if we decide we are.

So go do it!

Why It Matters to Claim Your Identity as a Creative

Imposed identities can constrain us, but chosen identities can free us.

Nothing has helped me find fulfillment as a creative person more than deciding to view myself as a creative. Being a creative means more than just being involved in creative activities. It’s a particular way of experiencing and perceiving the world. I’ve always been a creative, but claiming that identity for myself felt, well, pretentious. Who am I to decide that I’m “a” creative? Isn’t that like saying I’m different and special in some way? Yes, it is. And that feels uncomfortable to me. But there’s no denying that I do experience and perceive the world differently. Not differently from everyone else, because there are a lot of creatives out there like me, but differently from the dominant culture. No one is going to bequeath me with this identity – it’s my responsibility to claim it for myself. And it’s my right. Everyone has that right. You have it. So try it on for size.    

Identities can give us permission to fully express ourselves, and this is what claiming the identity of a creative did for me. It provided me with an avenue for interpreting and describing my particular way of being in the world. No longer were my peculiarities and challenges signs of personal failure. No, they’re part of what it means to be a creative. And I’m not alone. There are other creatives out there! Hi, other creatives! You’re not alone, either.  

I want to explicate what being a creative means to me. Maybe it means something similar to you, or maybe not. Remember, you get to decide the contents of your own identity. Only you have sovereignty over the meaning of your own experience of being in the world. But I hope that what I have to say about my experience will resonate in a way that helps if you are struggling with direction and figuring out your place in the world as a creative person.

Here’s what I think. Creativity isn’t something any of us have to reach for. All human beings are naturally creative. But some people need creativity to be an explicit and pervasive part of their lives in order to feel fulfilled and happy. Often these people are the artists of society, but not always. Many creative people do not consider themselves artists, either because the term connotes creating at an elite level that they don’t feel they measure up to, or they don’t express their creativity through a “proper” art. While I think creative people of all kinds absolutely can and should claim the identity of artist, I personally prefer calling myself a creative.

My primary avenue of creative expression in the world is writing, and I do consider myself to be a writer. But my identity as a writer is fairly mundane: to me it simply indicates that I write. I write a lot. It’s part of my business, but I also journal, write fiction, and narrate experiences in my head (a common writer trait). Oh, and don’t tell anyone, but I also narrate out loud when I’m home alone (this is one of the reasons I decided to try podcasting haha). Being a writer means that I enjoy writing, do it as much as I can, and that I strive to be good at it. My identity as a creative serves a different purpose. It is less implicated with what I do, and more with what I am. Writing is what I do, but the way I experience and perceive the world is mediated through being a creative.

What that means to me is that my entire life in all its aspects is my ultimate creative project. Creativity isn’t just something I do in my leisure time. I approach everything I do – well, I try, at least – from the center of my creative being. I live from the inside of my creative capacity, and it lends its light and color to my experience of being in the world. I call this whole-life creativity. What you’ve probably picked up on by now is that I don’t define being a creative by specific personality traits. While I do think creatives tend to have certain characteristics, like sensitivity, introversion, and artistic sensibilities, I see being a creative as a combination of a need to experience the world and express the self through creativity, a preference for the use of generative, rather than productive, energy, and a sense of purpose that involves meaning-making.

What claiming the identity of a creative has done for me is given me permission to live my life as a creative without apology. Whereas before I struggled to feel that my life had meaning, I now have a strong sense that my purpose is to create meaning and put it out into the world. And that’s what I do, every day. I do it through my words, sure, but also through how I experience being myself in the world. For me, that’s the fullest expression of my creative potential, regardless of my productive output as a creative person.

Like all identities, my identity as a creative is an evolving thing. I prefer it to be that way. Your identity should be something you define, not the other way around. An identity will begin to constrain and limit you if you freeze it. But if you develop and open and accepting relationship with your identity, it will free you.

If You Can Cultivate One Skill During Times of Upheaval, Let it Be This One

Curiosity is multipurpose and adaptive, and will see you through times of great change.

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

These are not easy times for creatives. Creative people must maintain a certain level of sensitivity and receptivity if they want to continue to do their creative work. When the whole world seems to have gone insane, we are slapped with a horrible dilemma: do we protect our gentle souls by closing ourselves off, or do we allow ourselves to be open to all the turmoil in order to continue to create? Sometimes it’s not a choice. Creative blockage is a natural reaction to challenging times.

The year 2020 has changed our world forever. We instinctively understand that there will be no “getting back to normal.” But the events of this year are part of a larger movement of history. This hasn’t been just a bad year – for better or for worse it’s the gateway to a new era. And most of us creative gentle souls understandably have a lot of fear about what has been happening and how it will develop. How can we survive in these changing times? How can we thrive? If there’s one skill you can work to develop and strengthen in the new era, let it be this one: curiosity. Here’s why. Curiosity is the antidote to fear, and is thus the wellspring of creativity.      

Curiosity is open-minded.

Fear shuts the doors of our soul. Slams them shut. In shutting us off from the world, it makes our own personal world small. Too small to contain the resources we need to thrive creatively. That’s the compromise we make, often knowingly: we avoid discomfort or pain, but it means we live in a creative straightjacket. This may feel right in the moment. You do what you have to do to survive. I’ve been there, spent years in that place. It’s called burnout. And burnout is something you have to get through by going through – trying to avoid or ignore it won’t work. But when you are ready, developing curiosity can help you open up your world again.

What is curiosity? It’s caring about things. This is why it tends to disappear when fear begins to rule your perspective. When you care, you are vulnerable to hurt. So start small. Maybe the thing you are able to care about right now is the ant colony in your backyard. What’s it like to be an ant, I wonder? (Seriously, I do wonder). Ultimately creatives are drawn to the big questions – why do people behave as they do? But if all you’ve got in you right now is a question about the secret lives of ants, that’s more than fine.

When you’re ready to let your world get a little bigger, curiosity will help you deal with the big feelings: the fear, pain, and confusion. When despair clouds your vision, intellectual curiosity can help you separate yourself somewhat from the traumas of our age. The work of creatives requires us to immerse ourselves in the eddies and swells of the current zeitgeist. Being able to pull out by cultivating an observational perspective is critical to keeping our sanity. The balance between analytical and emotional engagement is like constantly adjusting a zoom lens. Diving in deep, pulling out. Getting sucked into the swirl, dragging ourselves to shore. Curiosity helps us exercise those muscles.

Curiosity is ambiguity-embracing.

The world defies our control-seeking drive toward rationality. It is full of circumstances that don’t go as planned for reasons we cannot understand, of events we could not predict, and outcomes that defy logic. While this is always true, during times like these, when the fabric of our reality is ripping apart, it becomes particularly apparent. If it feels like the world is insane, that up is down and wrong is right, it’s because during times of great change our deeply held assumptions and beliefs are shown for what they are: socially constructed realities that are flimsier than we had ever imagined.

The universe’s basic architecture is one of paradox. The human social world tries to counteract this by creating order, but ultimately we can never fully escape the fundamental ambiguity of our existence. As much as we try to crystalize our understanding of things into structures of knowledge that are both explanatory and predictive, we will always eventually be confounded. If we keep trying to fit reality to our conception of what reality should be, we will continually be hitting our head against a wall. Curiosity is what enables us to perceive and acknowledge the inherent ambiguity and unpredictability of the human predicament. Because curiosity is a seeking quality, it fosters a sense of interest when faced with mystery, rather than repulsion or resentment. This is important because…

Curiosity is boundary-pushing.

During times of upheaval and change, creative people have an opportunity to thrive. But we will only be able to do that if we make use of the situation before us. Look at it this way: part of the reason our world is going through such turmoil right now is because people are craving change. They are tired of the stagnant old ways. Remember: while it appears that our institutions are experiencing a breakdown, it’s part of a larger process of breakthrough. This is a natural evolution all cultures and societies go through every now and again – and people who are able to see what is happening and take advantage of it to create new opportunities from the rubble of the old ones will flourish. But it requires being open to both the world and our own responses to it. It requires having a broader vision, seeing beyond conventional, fear-based interpretations of circumstances, and pushing back against the reactionary contractions that always meet the emergence of new ways of being. Remember: contractions are paradoxically the very movements that result in birth.  

Creative people are primed for times such as these, but only if they can maintain their openness to the world around them. Curiosity can guide and sustain you. If you can develop one skill to get you through these crazy times, let it be curiosity.

Getting Lost Is a Creative Apprenticeship If You Tell the Story Right

Learn to interpret your experiences in a way that points you toward your purpose.

Growing up, I always felt like I had my eyes on a target beyond the horizon. I knew there was something out there for me, but it seemed forever just out of reach. I kept trying for it even when it took me far from home and I felt utterly lost. I’m a seeker, as I think many creatives are. Having no roadmap for your life is exhilarating, but you will get lost. While it feels awful to go through, these times are your creative apprenticeship. Learning how to interpret your lost times can help you build a life that feels more meaningful and purpose-driven. The key is in how you tell your own story.

I’ll give you some examples from my own life of how this works. There have been two times that I’ve felt desperately lost. The first was when I returned from living overseas in my mid-twenties. I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I ended up taking any job that came my way. One was at a young internet startup, with all the office culture you’d associate with such a place, and another was at a retirement home that included a dementia ward. I had a master’s degree at the time; none of this work required one. A conventional perspective would be that I was wasting my education or taking work beneath me, but those jobs remain among the most valuable experiences of my life. In retrospect, they comprised my creative apprenticeship in the spectrum of the human struggle of becoming, from youth work culture to the experience of getting old. This period of my life informs my fiction more than any other.

Think of this as constructing your creative resume, except the stuff that goes on it is everything that would look bad on a conventional resume. Take experiences that make you feel like a failure in the conventional realm and reinterpret them from the perspective of the creative realm. Unlike formal apprenticeships, you often don’t know what a creative apprenticeship is training you for until after you’re done. It takes form in the way that you tell your own story in retrospect. No one is going to do this for you, give you a stamp of approval that says “Real Artist.” It is up to you to legitimize your own experiences. And let me be clear: your life experiences do qualify you to be an artist, and you can adopt that identity right now. 

The second time I got lost on my journey was when I was trying to finish my dissertation. I only had the mental and emotional energy to write twenty minutes a day. I’d spend the morning working up to my twenty minutes, drag myself from bed to do them, and that was it for me, day over. It was awful, but I knew not finishing would feel worse, so I kept going. I recovered from the writing by reading advice columns. All of them. Dear Sugar, Captain Awkward, Ask Polly, Carolyn Hax, Dear Prudence, Ask a Manager…. I even read Care and Feeding and I don’t have kids. I read the daily questions, I read the archives, and then I googled “advice columns” to find more.

How pitiful was I? So depressed I spent most of my days in bed refreshing websites in hopes they’d put up another question about problems I didn’t even have. Needless to say, my self-esteem was in the gutter. But something was happening. I started practicing answering each question myself before I read the response. Not for any purpose, just because it was another way to distract myself and pass the time. I began having opinions about the quality of the responses, disagreeing with some, learning from others. And around this time my acquaintances were coming to me more and more about problems they were struggling with…because I gave good advice. After I’d finished my dissertation, I began to see that dark time in my life more constructively. What if it wasn’t wasted time but part of my training for my purpose in the world? There was a lot more that happened along the way, but long story short, I’m now a creativity coach. I didn’t set out with this goal in mind, but reframing my experiences from the perspective of creative apprenticeship helped me get here.

Learning how to tell your own story can help you realize that you are legitimately qualified to express who you are in the world in the way that you choose, and viewing your experiences as training – apprenticeship – can help you tell that story. If you want to live a fully liberated creative life without apologies, it’s essential that you believe from the depths of your being that you have a right to do so. And you do. You’ve earned that right. You’ve got this. You’ve trained for it.

So take a look at your own experiences, and in particular the stuff that conventional mores tell you isn’t valuable. How do you spend your down time, when you aren’t involved in stuff you have to do? What we gravitate toward when we are depleted by life responsibilities shows us what sustains and inspires us. You may be thinking something like, “I spend that time scrolling through IG/binging on Netflix/staring at a wall.” Look deeper. What feeds do you follow, what catches your eye? What do you obsess over? What are you fantasizing about? What do you love learning about? What opens the door to that realm where time disappears and you are fully absorbed by what you are doing/thinking/seeing? This is the creative realm, and the more you learn how to work with the creative energy that permeates it, the more meaningful and purpose-driven your life will feel to you. And you might just discover your life purpose. 

What It Actually Means When Someone Says You're Selfish

How to start being unapologetically yourself.

If you are the type of person who follows the path less taken, chances are you’ve been criticized for it at some point in your life. People who are particularly individualistic, like creatives and other types of seekers, are vulnerable targets for condemnation because they challenge the status quo. Our culture professes to value independent, creative thinking…as long as you still play along. Some of us don’t want to play along – in fact, we may want to leave the room altogether. This isn’t a matter of inclination; it’s about the survival of our spirit. But living a wholehearted life in which you are fully yourself comes with a cost. Other people may not like it. I’ve been called selfish, lazy, pretentious, and arrogant for traveling my own path. Here I’ll focus on the first of these, as “selfish” is probably the most common judgement aimed at nonconformists, and it’s one we often hear from our own inner judge (you can find some of my views on laziness in this post). Let me start by asking you a question: if you are selfish, so what?

I’m quoting Madonna here. “So what!” was her response when nude photos of her were discovered in 1985. I was under ten at the time, but I still remember seeing that phrase on the cover of a news magazine in Waldenbooks (remember those?). It stopped me in my tracks; admiration overwhelmed me. Even at that young age, I could see that these were magic words, capable of turning criticism to dust. But I understood something else at an instinctive level that took me decades to be able to articulate. Whoever found the photos was hoping to use them to diminish Madonna, and she refused their agenda. But the way that she did this wasn’t to deny the ugliness they were launching at her. It was to embrace it as a positive. The power of this approach is like that moment in the Wizard of Oz when the great wizard is revealed to be nothing but a pitiful little man hiding behind a curtain.

I could run through all the reasons you’re not actually selfish for pursuing a life path that isn’t what’s expected and condoned, give you advice about putting your own air mask on first and the importance of self-care. But doling out the standard prescriptions is not what I do here on this blog. My purpose is to help you upend the internalized beliefs we have all been socialized into accepting about what it means to be a good person living the right way. I want to help you not only live life on your own terms, but feel good about it. Here I’ll tell you what it actually means when you are criticized for being selfish, so that you can get to a place where you can say “so what” and mean it.

When someone says you’re selfish, the most powerful weapon in your arsenal is this question: what is their agenda? There is only one answer. The commonly accepted definition of selfish is that you are acting to meet your own needs over those of others. Whoever is condemning you isn’t much concerned with the first part – it’s the second, italicized, part that matters to them. So the answer to the question is this: their agenda is to get you to meet their needs. It really is that simple. What selfish actually means in such exchanges isn’t that you are acting to please yourself over others. It means that this person has needs that aren’t being met and is trying to get you to do that work for them.

But what about when the criticism is coming from within ourselves? Our inner judge is often our worst critic. Women especially are socialized to serve and are primed to feel guilty for not meeting other people’s needs. This inner judge is the one who makes you think, “Maybe I am selfish” even when you reject the external critics who said so – or when no one has actually said it at all. Our inner judge is very difficult to argue with or disregard because it operates from a position of cultural authority, our internalized values about how we should or should not behave. It speaks directly to our sense of ourselves as (un)worthy human beings. The question you ask it is the same, though: what is its agenda? But we need to understand who this inner judge is before we interrogate it.

This inner judge is not you, nor did you create it. It is not the same thing as your inner critic, who speaks with the voice of your insecurities. Your inner judge is a disciplining voice that is comprised of all the lessons you’ve absorbed from external disciplining voices – your family, teachers, peers, media – and its job is to ensure you are doing your part to uphold the cultural structures that enable society to function and endure. It does this by making sure that whatever you choose to do with your life, your primary (often subconscious) actions are for the good of your group. This is primal stuff with roots in evolutionary advantage. The dark side is that it also works to discipline those who challenge the status quo, because this threatens the underlying power structures of society. When the voice of your inner judge gets louder, that means you’re straying from societal norms. And that’s its agenda: to keep you in line.

Whether you are being called selfish by internal or external voices, both share this agenda. They are not interested in what’s to your benefit, though they may pay lip service to that. Their goal is to get you to behave in ways that benefit others. These voices are insidious. If you are a very individualistic nonconformist, particularly if you are also very sensitive, as creatives often are, their disciplining effect can kill your spirit. But you do not need to apologize for who you are. Only you have your best interests at heart, and you must be your own advocate. It’s a very difficult thing to do, but you can start by practicing your best Madonna response to the voices that seek to diminish you with critical arrows meant to damage your sense of worthiness. Yeah, I’m selfish. So what! 

How Creatives Can Use Crisis to Overcome Blocks

We are designed to thrive in the liminality.

These days it feels like the world is experiencing a lumbering, unending crisis. The pandemic, political and social turmoil, and the looming threat of climate change…the emotional weight of all this is profound. For creatives, times such as these can be overwhelming because they feel everything intensely. Creatives often find themselves blocked during crises because the process of creativity requires openness and receptivity, and painful times cause people to shut down. But I’ll let you in on a secret: creatives are actually meant to thrive in crises. Crisis signals that big changes are occurring. This space of transition, between what came before and what will come after, is called the liminality. It is a time when old rules and traditions are breaking down, and it holds infinite creative possibility for new ways of being. Creatives are optimized for the liminality because they are able to sense and take advantage of this creative possibility. So how can creatives work through their blocks and access their creative potential?   

If you are a creative and find yourself blocked during tumultuous and unstable times, consider that the reason may not be the crisis state itself. Creatives are generally empaths, meaning they feel and absorb the emotions of those around them, including those of the wider population they live among. During times of crisis, people feel stressed, frightened, confused, grief-stricken, and angry. Creatives pick up on that; nor are they immune to these emotional reactions themselves. The difference is, creatives also have a deep intuitive sense of the potentialities of crisis, and they have access to the full range of emotions that crisis provokes – including excitement and inspiration. If you are experiencing a creative block, it may be because you are tuning in more strongly with your empathic nature than your intuitive one.

There are some steps you can take to reroute your perception through your intuitive, creative nature. The first is to accept that you are energized by things that others may experience as wholly negative. Crisis times are scary and depressing, no doubt, but you don’t have to experience them that way just because other people do. You can acknowledge the challenges of living in times of great uncertainty while also seeing that such times are full of possibility because of their uncertain nature. Things are changing in interesting ways. The old reality is falling away; we don’t yet know the contours of the new reality. As a creative, it’s natural for you to feel energized in unsure situations that cause many to react with caution or fear – embrace that without guilt.

Another step you can take to access your intuitive, creative capacities is to trust your own perceptions. While it’s good to stay informed, no viewpoint presented on media platforms has a claim on truth. We create our realities through how we perceive the world, and you possess sole sovereignty over your own reality. Pay attention to what you are seeing and feeling. Make note of those little sparks of interest and excitement that flare up, the ones that don’t jive with what anyone else seems to be experiencing or talking about. Explore your thoughts and feelings that seem out of sync. That’s your intuition working for you. Believe what your intuition is telling you. 

I’m going to get esoteric with this last step. Creatives experience reality as circular or spiraled, rather than linear. We live in a linear, rational society, but internally creatives reside in multiple and intersecting realities. Consequently, their feelings and thoughts are complex and multifaceted, and they can struggle with identifying which are “real” or “true.” Here’s the thing: they’re all real and true. Especially the ones that contradict each other. The ambiguity of liminality opens up creatives’ sensitivity to paradox, where multiple seemingly opposing things are simultaneously true. This is a very uncomfortable place to dwell in, but being able to sit with paradox is essential to the generation of creative work because it is where pure creative energy resides. As a creative, you are a channel for this energy – you manifest it in the world. Pure creativity energy imbues everything you think, feel, and do; it is your calling to recognize that and embody it. 

The era we are living in right now is one of liminality. It’s an extraordinary time in the literal sense of that word: we are outside of ordinary times, refugees from the familiar. But crises can also occur on a purely personal scale. It took me a long time to realize that throughout my life I’ve actually sought out and generated personal crises because I’m a creative – I just thought I was neurotic and unstable! But no, it’s because I require crisis in order to grow as a creative. Learning to deal with crisis, whether it be imposed or self-generated, in a constructive rather than destructive way is key to creative thriving. The in-betweenness of liminality is a threshold, a space where nothing is sure, and everything is possible.* So step on up: wonders await you. 

*Based on a quote by Margaret Drabble

Are You Still Searching for a Job That’s the Right Fit?

Maybe trying to find the “right” job is the wrong approach.

I’m one of the many creatives who decided early on that I would pursue “regular” jobs rather than attempt a creative career. As a writer of fiction, I was realistic about my chances of ever making a living off of it. So I tried to find jobs that were “parallel” to my writing, jobs that involved writing and that would allow me to be a novelist in my spare time. This failed on two fronts. I didn’t end up writing many novels, let alone publishing any, and I found myself severely burned out by the time I was in my mid-thirties. I’d always believed that there was a “right” job out there for me, but I never found it. I tried one thing and then another, and failed to capitalize on my experiences and build a career of note. 

I never could get the hang of the linear, progressive career trajectory, and this made me feel that something was wrong with me. What I realize now is that my story is typical for creatives. The problem isn’t us. It’s that we are part of a system that tries to assimilate those who would live by a different set of values. Creatives just aren’t that good for the economy. We want to do what we want to do, and when a job ceases to inspire us, we cannot stay in it and remain sane. On top of this, we have very limited reserves for dealing with bullshit. So our work histories often look patchy, and we get questions about why we haven’t made anything of ourselves, given our talents.

This perspective is built on faulty assumptions about what we should want or pursue in our working lives. Let’s tear some of those assumptions down.  

Career trajectory is a lie

The idea of a career trajectory is just that: an idea. It’s an idealized model of what a “successful” career looks like that has emerged from a system that values the productive capacity of workers. A successful worker is someone who is consistently productive up to the point of no longer being able to contribute, i.e. retirement. The problem is that fulfilling work and a successful career are usually at odds, because they operate on opposing tracks. A traditional career trajectory is meant to benefit the organization you work for, and through that the larger economy. People who stay in one industry and move up the promotion ladder are efficient cogs in a smoothly running machine. A fulfilling career, on the other hand, is for the benefit of the worker. It may sometimes happily coincide with the ideal career trajectory, but mostly not. It may have starts and stops, an industry switch, retraining, or any number of inefficient moves. The system, while paying lip service to the idea of a fulfilling career, will punish you in numerous ways for trying to have one. Anything like a spotty work history or one that seems to lack focus will be a detriment in job hunting. And thus the truth is revealed: the system does not actually want you to be fulfilled by your work, unless it is a side effect of your productive capacity.

Creatives are particularly disadvantaged in this system. It’s not because we cannot find fulfilling work. It’s that in order to continue to be fulfilled, we need to feel inspired – and generally working in the same career for our whole lives isn’t going to do it. What feels like the right path can quickly become the wrong one once we have reaped all the inspiration we can from it. Our system likes to frame this experience as that job not having been the right one to begin with. This puts the responsibility squarely on the worker to find the job that will be “the one,” in which they can finally fulfill the capitalist requirement of sustained productivity. But creatives are not linear people, nor do we function well within rationalized systems that constrain creativity. We usually end up blaming ourselves for being “unfocused,” “lazy,” “selfish,” or any other negative character trait the system likes to assign to people who fail at traditional career trajectory. In this environment, creatives can often begin to distrust their instincts.

No. Trust your instincts. In a system designed around precepts that are fundamentally at odds with how you need to live your life, your choices will inevitably look bad or wrong, or perhaps even like failures. They’re not. 

Career trajectories don’t exist anymore, anyway

In high school I can remember being told that kids in my generation were the first who could not expect to do as well as their parents. I imagine this is even more true for youth today. I came up during the era of bankrupt pension funds and a loss of trust in big companies. Now we are transitioning to a gig economy in which long-term, secure jobs with good benefits are increasingly scarce. It’s a painful time to be alive – but some of this is actually good news for creatives. Why? Because we are built for times such as these. We understand job insecurity because we’ve always dealt with being unable to settle down. Many of us already have the experience of patching together a living that allows us to continue our art. And we have a head start on dealing with the feelings of inadequacy that come from not being able to build a traditional career. So keep on doing your thing, creatives! 

You will never “figure things out” (hopefully)

The other day I was listening to a podcast by a woman about a decade younger than me who was talking about how it took her a long time to figure out what she wanted to do with her life, and that she’d finally done it. I remember feeling exactly that way at her age. And I couldn’t help but smile at her confidence and enthusiasm. It’s likely she’ll need to reinvent herself a few more times before her allotted life is over.

Make no mistake: there is no such thing as figuring it out, at least not for all time. You may find something that works now, and it may feel like it’s The Thing, but I can promise you that you will grow to a point where you’ll need something new. This is a good thing! Follow those instincts. Life is long (well, hopefully), so don’t fall for the lie that it should look like education/preparation → marriage/kids → career/savings → retirement/“fun” → decline/death. Instead of feeling inadequate if your life veers around and seems to fold back on itself, be proud of it. “You have to live spherically, in many different directions,” as Federico Fellini said. “Never lose your childish enthusiasm, and things will come your way.” Words to live by for creatives!

Intuitive Creatives Are Optimized for the New World

Are you an intuitive creative? Here’s why it’s your time to thrive.

I’m a synthesizer rather than an analyzer. Analysts take things apart, breaking them down into components in order to understand them. I do the opposite: I cull evidence from disparate sources and put it together to tell a story. I understand the world by recognizing patterns and seeing the big picture. 

At some point in the first decade of this century I began noticing social, political, and economic trends that pinged in my mind. They started to form a picture for me that told a story about transformation. Nothing can hold forever; I believed we were experiencing the beginnings of a period of tumultuous change that would most certainly cause tremendous upheavals. Secretly, I thought we were probably entering a phase of history somewhat like a new dark ages.

Many people are recognizing that COVID-19 will change our world forever. It already has. Life as it was before is over. But in fact, this process of change has already been going on for some time in all areas of our public lives. The increased polarization we are seeing around the world is part of this. People are feeling more anxiety and suspicion. And right now, it feels like the world has gone crazy. 

We will emerge from this latest challenge, but there will be more ahead. Make no mistake: we are entering a new world. It will hopefully bring positive change, but the process will be (and has already been) painful. What can we do? How can we survive these tumultuous, frightening times? If you are an intuitive creative, it may seem that your high sensitivity, empathic nature, and unconventionality make you maladapted to dealing with all this. In fact, the opposite is true. You are actually made for times like this. Here’s why.   

You saw it coming

I don’t mean you saw this exact thing coming (though maybe you did!). But like me, you probably have been feeling subterranean shifts for some time. Even if you haven’t consciously recognized what’s happening, you’ve experienced increased anxiety. You’ve intuitively understood that what we’ve come to take for granted about the way things work in the world may not hold true in the uncertain future. It’s important to understand that your anxiety is more than just a reaction to the times. It’s information. As an HSP, intuitive, and/or empath, you pick up on energies all around you. You see and feel things other people don’t. Pay attention to your impressions, and learn to trust them. 

You know that the best information comes from within you 

Sure, experts in various fields have much to teach us, and we should listen to them. But no one knows you better than you do. You are the foremost expert on yourself. Intuitives who trust themselves are powerful, because they don’t waste any more time than absolutely necessary parsing the constant stream of information and opinions we are all inundated with. They are able to immediately grasp the important facts, understand what they need to do for themselves, their loved ones, and their community, and take action. One of the most interesting qualities of highly sensitive intuitives is that while they may suffer from sometimes debilitating anxiety in daily life, in a crisis they can be the most incisive, calm, and rational people in the room.

You think outside of the outside of the box

Yes, you read that correctly. Not only are intuitive creatives unconventional in their perspectives and approaches to life, they are true original thinkers. So much so that they can even appear, well, crazy to other people. Even other unconventional thinkers. What makes it so difficult for us to find a place in society and its institutions is exactly what makes us exceptionally suited to times that are not normal. People who thrive within the structures of society tend to feel disoriented to the point of panic when these are upended. While intuitive creatives feel disoriented, too, they may also feel strangely energized. Don’t feel guilty about this! You feel this way because you are actually in your element during times like these. When the binding, punishing structures of society-as-it-was fall away, space opens up for you to not only come into your own, but to be appreciated in a way you have never been before.

What does this mean for you during these strange times? If you haven’t been feeling very confident about moving forward into the uncertain future, I encourage you to begin by appreciating the qualities I discuss above. Treat your anxiety as information – anxiety doesn’t feel good, but instead of focusing on the discomfort, interrogate what it’s telling you about your situation. Trust what you discover! Work on developing a respect for the special personal knowledge you generate. Manifest that in the outside world through action. In crazy times, what we need are creative solutions. What we need are “crazy” ideas. In the new world that’s coming, there will be space for those ideas, and for you.