When creativity grows quiet
Some of you will have noticed I did not blog last week. This week I was headed down the same track. Another one of those weeks where I had a couple of topics I wanted to pursue - even jotting some thoughts on paper - but then I just wasn't able to write a blog post. This is not a writing block; this is a creative silence.
Poking around the internet, I learned that what I am feeling is not burnout, fatigue, or apathy. The best description I found was in an article by creative health cartographer Kathryn Vercillo about creative numbness.
“There’s a kind of creative silence that doesn’t feel like a block. It feels like a blank space. Not frustration. Not resistance. Just stillness. You aren’t fighting with the work. You’re not procrastinating either. You just don’t feel anything. You aren’t avoiding your art so much as forgetting why it mattered in the first place. This is creative numbness. And if you're in it, you're not broken. You're responding to something real.”
Does this sound familiar? You don’t have to be a professional writer or artist to feel this way. You may not want to pick up your quilting project, tend to your garden, or try new recipes.
I have certainly felt this way before, usually at times when dysthymia poked holes in my mental health, and more recently, during the pandemic. Some of the women in my writing groups also feel this numbness, arriving with half-written stories or no stories at all. We discussed this inability to write - or be creative in any sense of the word - and recognized that the underlying reason seems to be our deep despair for all that is happening in our world these days. This aligns with Vercillo’s article: “…when you live with chronic stress, unresolved trauma, emotional fatigue, or long-term burnout, your nervous system can lose access to regulation. Instead of moving smoothly through states of activation and rest, it may shift into one of the body’s instinctive survival responses: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.” The response I am experiencing is freeze, which feels like stillness, numbness, or dissociation.
Vercillo introduces the Window of Tolerance, attributed to Dan Siegel, co-founder of UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center, to help us understand what we are feeling. We all have a window of tolerance where we can emotionally self-regulate. “Even if something challenging happens, we can stay grounded, open, curious, and flexible. We can remain in the present moment and respond accordingly. We can function well.” When we are above our window of tolerance, we are in a state of anxiety, feeling overwhelmed and stressed. Creative numbness lives below the window of tolerance. Our bodies may feel sluggish or shut down. Our minds may go quiet. Vercillo suggests we may feel like a ghost inside our own practice. She says this is our body’s way of protecting us, slowing us down or temporarily disconnecting us from overwhelm.
Vercillo says the path back is not about forcing productivity. It’s about gently expanding the window of tolerance, finding safe, small, ways to reconnect with our creative selves.
I know I am mostly regurgitating what I read in Vercillo’s article. Frankly, that’s about all I can offer you during this creative lull. So you may want to head over and read her article. Vercillo four strategies for reconnecting to our creative selves. She uses these in her own practice as an artist and in the work she does with clients.
Finding Our Creative Selves Again
1. Let your body re-enter the creative experience before your mind catches up.
I plan to welcome myself back to my office corner with a plant on my desk, a refreshed playlist, and re-configuring the art on my wall. I will open a new pack of Pilot fine liners and pull out a new writing pad of thin-lined pages.
2. If your current project feels too distant to touch, return to what you’ve already created.
I will pull out my files with workshop ideas, and dig into my book folder. My book folder contains notes for a book I may never write; however, my notes always remind me of the passion I feel about writing. And like Vercillo, I will re-read both half-finished blog posts and some of my past blog posts, possibly welcoming creative butterflies with the spark of a new idea.
3. Allow yourself to create without the need to perform.
On my bookshelf, I have some new sketchbooks and an array of coloured felts, intending to try my hand at creating an illustrated life journal as a daily mindfulness practice. Sounds like this might be a way to start creating - just for me!
4.Name the moment. Sometimes what feels like silence is actually a pause that wants your attention, not your intervention.
I know it is more than just despair in the world that is causing this creative numbness. This is a good reminder to make time to sit with this stillness.
So for now, I will not force myself to push through this silence, instead I trust it will pass in its own time. If you’ve felt something similar, I’d really like to hear from you. How do you move through these quiet stretches in your own creative life?
