the creative tide
At fourteen I am a handful. Even I know it.
I feel like some kind of undetonated dynamite that gets thrown from person to person, each one hoping that I wont explode on them.
I do my best to understand the world around me but it’s like I’m living in a parallel universe. School sucks, Mum isn’t around and with Dad, I have a ridiculous amount of freedom, much more than other girls my age. I roam the streets, skip school, experiment with drugs & alcohol and find a tribe.
One day someone introduces me to The Doors and immediately I start collecting cassettes. My favourite song is Moonlight Drive - I listen to it every night as I fall asleep. The lyrics and melodies pick me up and carry me away into the night like magic.
I am inspired by Jim’s lyrics: they are so painfully eloquent. How does he manage to transmute his passionate & obsessive love for Pam, wild acid trips, addictions and volatile sexual affairs into songs that are so darn beautiful? Damn.
One day I grab a scummy old notebook from under the bed and I make a decision to dedicate it to all the crazy shit that is in my head. It will be an outlet for my awkwardness and somewhere to direct my endless stream of questions. A collection of my truth! I’m not sure how to write poetry or songs like Jim, but I feel like I have a lot to say.
I will have to hide this notepad pretty fucking well.
After a few days I skim back over the pages to reflect on what I have written. It is alarming and disconcerting. The words are like wild animals scurrying over the pages - some are small and meek like mice with little question marks following them and others are like wildcats clawing at the page in giant lettering, wanting to escape.There is a lot of swearing. When I think about someone else reading my words it makes me want to burn the pages. It makes me want to stop writing.
But in my scummy notebook I am free to be sad, lonely, desperate, lost, broken and alone: the pages hold me unconditionally. It feels good. So I keep at it.
My ‘words’ eventually start to take shape. I start to play around with rhyme and rhythm. Soon I am writing some version of poetry. I keep it secret because no one I know writes poetry (except for Jim) and I’m not sure anyone would understand it anyway.
Over the years I fill up quite a few more scummy notebooks.
When I am nineteen my neighbour gifts me his guitar as he is moving out and tells me I should learn how to play.
Ok, sure.
Within weeks I am pairing my words with a couple of basic chords, breathing life into songs that I work on for hours, days, weeks.
Still, I keep it hidden.
I only play when my boyfriend leaves the house, never sharing with even my closest friends and always conscious that someone will hear me when they pass by the house. It feels a contradiction to so passionately love creating music ...whilst lacking the audacity to share it with anyone.
And then I meet some new people who arrive to town. Immediately I think ‘hey, these are MY kind of people’. I'm in awe of their bold, creative self-expression: they dress, talk and sing however they want. They are free thinkers who challenge society and live in a bus with their cute 2 year old kid. I gravitate to them straight away.
One evening I am hanging out with my new mates. They are playing music and out of the blue I find myself sharing that I’ve written a song. They encourage me to sing and soon enough I’m belting out some two-chord melancholic song to an audience of three. I am so incredibly nervous but man it feels good. This experience manages to crack open the dam in my my shyness.
For the next ten years I squirrel away with pen, paper & guitar creating dozens of songs ... and singing them. I stay up until 3 am marrying my lyrics with chords. I race home from work on my lunch-break and spend 53 minutes of the lunch hour frantically getting the song onto paper & refining the chord changes. And for the whole afternoon at work I do my job badly whilst counting down the minutes until I can get home to finish it.
This creative flow is like nothing I’ve experienced: I’m a burst artery, an overflowing river… a conduit.
And when life starts to turn awry (as life does), the songs soften the blows (turns out volatile relationships, childhood wounds, addiction and self worth issues are all conducive to great song writing – who knew?). I write the shit out of it all and then I process it all by structuring the words beautifully and adding some melody. The pages mirror my life back to me. Sometimes it’s nice. Mostly, it’s a bitter pill to swallow. And every time it seems to be played in minor chords...
Soon, the world has me taking certain steps to ‘grow up’ in it's capitalist conditions. Sigh. I sign mortgage papers, get engaged. I start doing more overtime and play music less. I look at house plans and buy furniture. It all seems to act like cancer to my music, the deluge now just a dribble. I can't even get a creative hard-on when I'm drunk.
In some ways I feel like I’ve failed. I consider how spending a decade of my life making music feels like a waste of time more so than an investment.
The lack of inspiration to play guitar I can handle, but the loss of writing is a hard blow.
But I move on with life. I travel. I start a new life on a different coast. A baby arrives.
As a single mum I struggle to keep my head above water in all the ways. I watch everyone around me seemingly being able to do life so easily (this is not an actuality and only my perception obvs). Everything I do is invariably difficult. I try to keep that old momentum going – to travel, to be creative, to nurture myself, be healthy and function as a human (you know be one of those mums). But the truth is I can barely take a shit in peace, do the grocery shopping or brush my hair.
Hell hath no fury like a tiny baby.
After trying one too many times to relocate my creative source - I give up. I place my love of music and words into a little box and I bury it somewhere far, far away.
And I take up post as a one-hundred-percent-twenty-four-seven mother who fills each and every minute of the day with duties that never end.
I do this for two years.
And then something happens. I start to feel a familiar yearning in my gut: I want to make shit. I want to create something. I pick up the guitar but all that comes out is baa baa black sheep. I cringe at myself and put down the guitar. I try writing a song but the blank page screams vacuity back at me.
I decide to try something different.
I plant a garden. It’s not the prettiest garden you’ve ever seen. In fact, its kinda derelict looking – just a few herbs and flowers in old plastic pots. Soon enough I encounter obstacles: bush turkeys start digging into the pots so I build a makeshift fence around them. Then, some plants start wilting because they need more sun or wind protection or shade so I relocate them to other, more desirable locations around the house until they start looking happy again.
I gravitate more and more to the garden. When my son sleeps, I race out there to sit and read a book by the plants. I water them, bury my hands into the earth around them and watch them grow. The entire process requires nothing from me except my presence.
Something in me lets go and and ...bam...I find myself writing again.
Turns out I have a lot to say (and probably a bit too much to be contained within a song) so I dive into creative writing - I spend hours and days getting lost in words & stories. It feels like home.
I have come to learn that my creativity is nothing that I can successfully master or tame: it is a wild relationship that is cultivated by pure observation. I can harness and channel it when it flows but I also respect that it is changeable and unpredictable, like the weather.
From my experience, making any kind of art is a regularly underwhelming, often too-much-to-handle, ugly, fulfilling and exhilarating process that stabs you in the gut whilst giving you a giant hug. It's a collection of contradictions and like life, it is ambiguous and never a sure thing. It is death and rebirth. It is a pilgrimage that leaves us tired and uncertain but hungry for more of the trail.
x
Photograph in Rajasthan, India 2010 by Petr Stiebitz
(And yes I still have them👉🏾)
