Writing & mood
“Though this may not be absolutely true for every single person, it’s reasonable to imagine that a good number of people’s creative work could benefit from attending to their health, their relationships, their immediate real life.”
The above wisdom is taken from Wendy C. Ortiz’s “::how to write the book while not writing the book::,” part of a series of craft chapbooks that Sundress Publications generously publishes online for free.
On the day I finished reading the chapbook, I sent a text to a dear friend, reporting on the current status of my emotional landscape after a mini bout of depression. She and I chat often about our various creative outlets, and we’ve made it a regular practice to send each other postcards with creative prompts on them, leaning into the strange accountability of fitting everything we want to inspire, and all of its consequences, on these old-fashioned 4-by-6-ish pieces of paper.
She spoke about the landscape of her own day, celebrated my lifting mood, and then asked if I tend to write “no matter what headspace I’m in?”
Her question got me thinking about the ways I experience myself, my fundamental personhood, in relation to mood and creative output.
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The thing about creativity is that it isn’t dependent on feeling a certain way. In my bones: I know this. You don’t have to feel like being creative in order to create. It might be useful here to distinguish between commitment and motivation, the former being something theoretically stable enough to withstand the organic fluctuations of the latter.
Which isn’t to say that you should be creating things when you don’t feel like it—there’s little self-empowerment to glean from turning art into a chore. Plus, ignoring the season of writing that you’re in is a good way to alienate yourself from the landscape of yourself, to make yourself feel like one big giant weed.
But there’s medicine in knowing you have the capacity to create at all times, should you want to. And medicine, too, in noticing your ability to get beneath those superficial layers that keep you thinking you must always and only make something good in order to justify the act of making it, or that each iteration of your work must be your best.
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What I want you to know today:
Sometimes, taking care of yourself is finally making that doctor’s appointment, or setting your vitamins somewhere more visible, or not falling asleep to game shows even though Hulu just updated like 8 seasons of your favorite ones.
But also?
Sometimes, taking care of yourself is remembering that you can be creative in order to feel more like yourself, rather than waiting to feel more like yourself in order to be creative.
Sometimes, you just need to be in the bad mood and write the bad poem, knowing (trusting) that the nourishing thing is taking place, whether you feel it or not.