Do you start to feel unlike yourself when you haven’t created enough?
I get this ‘off’ feeling. It starts out being really subtle, just this delicate echo on the edge of my thoughts that something is missing. This message is easy to ignore. It’s easy to tamp it down by continuing to fill my mind with books and blogs and movies and TV shows and podcasts and audiobooks.
Then it gets louder. It starts to become a foghorn that loudly underpins my surface-level thoughts with its honk of discontent.
Yet even then, I frequently ignore it. I just push harder with the content-jamming and the text consumption, but I also add in other types of numbing – food or shopping or lotsandlotsofwine.
Seriously, I fill me up like nobody’s business. With an endless stream of stimulation. And most of it is awesome content (couldn’t get by without checking out all these incredible, fabulous ladies most days of the week) (and PS, have you seen Grand Designs? It is rocking my night-time TV world at the moment!) but… That’s just it. There’s always a but.
But if I keep consuming content without creating my own, I don’t feel good.
But if I don’t give my brain room to marinate in silence, I don’t feel good.
But if I don’t listen to what my body-mind-soul self is telling me (sometimes oh-so-softly, sometimes vuvuzela-loud), I don’t feel good.
I need to create. For me, that is mainly writing. Stories. Words. Whatever. If I am not actively building creation time into my weekly schedule, I do not feel good.
And it’s absolutely no good waiting for the muse to be in the house. Then I would be forever waiting. Turns out, (or so I’m figuring out) I have to sit down and write. Even when it feels clunky and slow and uncoordinated. Even when its the last thing that surface-Jess feels like doing (wanna go shopping! wanna read a book! wanna eat chocolate-coated almonds and watch Revenge!) (ummm, surface-Jess sounds a lot like an annoying teenager!).
Because it turns out, that’s exactly what makes soul-Jess sing.
♥
