Rewriting Creativity
I would love to preface this piece with some kind of reasonable explanation of why I took a lengthy + unplanned hiatus from regularly sharing my insides. But I’ve always been a bit rubbish at coming up with excuses. Sure, I’ve been busy, blah blah blah… but also, we don’t always need to hand out front row tickets to our personal metamorphosis. And sometimes we don’t need to explain the shit out of everything. Perhaps this is the era I’m currently in 😂
Though it certainly has not been a period of dormancy and in fact, I found myself falling, falling like Alice, d e e p in a creativity portal. Maybe this is why I have had less to share in other spaces. I once read that children don’t have the developmental capacity to thrive in all areas at once. Their cognitive, emotional, social + physical selves progress at different times in different ways. We are not biologically or psychologically built to spread ourselves too thinly. And, as someone who too was once a child, I do not enjoy spreading myself too thinly. So I have not.
I have spent some time developing a very weakened muscle that is songwriting. And can say with glee + rapture that this muscle is once again very strong.
But fuck me sideways, it has been a process.
Once upon a time, when I was high, drunk + tabletop dancing recklessly from one bad decision to the next, I managed to write songs prolifically. I’m not sure how I strung verses + choruses together, because at the time I barely knew my own name. It was the best of times, it was the blurriest of times. Regardless, I seized every opportunity to scribble down lyrics and marry them up to the handful of guitar chords that I knew. Life always interrupted my desire to write songs and this was a great place to be.
On occasion, I peruse this (thankfully archived) musical collection and my response is always the same: reverence of my past creative deluge AND cringe at the godforsaken content. My lord. In these songs of yesteryear, I remember twenty-year-old me very vividly. I want to console her, but also slap her across the face because her need for external validation + codependency is so predictable. I guess it’s all a necessary part of her evolution, so I give her a cuddle instead.
Besides, maybe writing songs about being stuck in sad, dark places is what helps her understand them better.
Revisiting music and catching Younger Me up to Me Now has been a trip. At first, I didn’t know what the hell to write about. I mean, if I was not off-chops or in some hellish drama of my own making, did I even know how to write emotive music? So, after some long boring stares onto blank pages, I decided to do exactly what I used to do when I was a fourteen-year-old angry, freckle-faced girl looking to understand herself + the world a little better: spew out whatever wanted to come out onto the page with wild abandon + zero judgement.
For anyone who has tried this (without filters, caution or an audience), you’ll know it’s a gross and rather embarrassing eruption of thoughts and ideas that you never want anyone to ever see. YOU don’t even want to see it. Beyond the hysterical nature of my ‘stream of consciousness’, my handwriting alone reflects signs of psychosis and disturbing hints of a ransom note writer. It’s a no-go zone for a fragile ego. The process is a wild flirtation with the dark parts of the psyche - but it is the creative lube that we all need once in a while.
Because we must step through the sticky stuff to get to the good bits.
The songwriting process these days sure is different. Without all the theatrics in the way, a clearer perspective on life + a little hindsight under my belt, the whole practice somehow feels way more potent. All that frolicking in the underworld taught me the importance of getting up close and personal with the nasty gutsy bits, but also not to be so blinded by suffering that I miss the point.
As someone who writes for fun + for a crust, I spend a lot of time creating solo, so it has been a huge expansion for me to collaborate with other humans (aka a band). There is something magical about bringing a song to life. The first line born of a feeling, emerging story, interwoven memories + thoughts that make love to chords, melodies and riffs. And then, a whole challenging aspect around loss of control/forced surrender, because musically (and in life), I can’t do it all. I have learned to love love love handing over the bones of song/idea and then standing back and shutting the fuck up while others contribute their genius. It always, always makes it better.
But making music is not for the faint hearted.
The process goes something like this:
Begin by wearing your bleeding heart on your sleeve, then grab the nearest pen and put your very vulnerable words to it. Then, read the words out loud, but instead of reading them per se, sound them out so they mimic something like an echo or bird or wolf. Stay in key, keep in time. In the final part of this complicated marriage, tell your stories using nothing but vocal cords, instruments + manipulated sound waves, all which land one way or another in ear canals, subsequently adjusting the frequency of the room.
It is one hundred percent exhilarating + one hundred percent confronting.
In finding music again, I am born again.
Man alive, how had I let this slide for slow long?
I’d like to blame parenting, working, lack of time, confidence or energy. But the truth is that I somehow forgot how much making music FED me.
Creativity has a million iterations. We are writers + musicians + painters + craftsmen + filmmakers. And sometimes these labels can make us feel safe + comfortable. But here’s the disclaimer: we are not solely these things. It is stifling to wear just one hat. Boxes are useful things but we are not meant to live in them. We are never supposed to stop exploring - we are meant to be out there, ripping it up like madmen, not knowing what the fuck we are doing, until we die.
So, in order to feel truly free to create, I need to give myself a recurring permission slip which says that I am allowed to do it all. I can write for work, write for pleasure, write songs, play bass guitar or piano, take photographs, make films, plant gardens or create an egg carton + fart art exhibition in the Netherlands, if that is what my heart desires.
I need the freedom to be curious, to be an amateur, to lose myself in something that doesn’t make sense, to follow nothing more than a thread or a sniff, to birth unexpected things and then - at the drop of a hat - completely pivot and try something new.
I need to know that when art, life + me have all transformed, I can then experience entirely new versions of these things altogether. Unapologetically, with gusto.
In careful excavation of our resistance, we discover the crux of our creative fire and it is here that we open up space to the curiosity + chaos that are necessary to make the things we were born to make.
❤️
PS. It is refreshing to be sprawling words onto a page again. Like music, perhaps I had forgotten how much this kind of writing feeds me too 😊
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