Undiscipline your Creativity
Earlier this year, I entered a 6-month mentorship container with a writer who’d been away from the page for some time. They came to me because they needed focused, trauma-informed assistance with getting back there.
It’s amazing what’s possible in 6 months—a large swath of time while we’re living it, sure, but also a drop in the bucket of one’s entire life.
By month two, they were sharing work with me consistently.
By month four, they’d accumulated a ton of self-confidence “data.”
And by the end of our container, they were sending their work out for publication.
This was their trajectory—their own goals & desires. Everyone’s path will look different.
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Besides celebrating that client’s incredible progress, I want to talk about a small, life-changing conversation we had.
It was early in our container, and they’d professed to me something about their lack of discipline—how they’d never been able to cultivate this quality for themself.
I can’t explain why the word landed so differently this time.
Discipline.
It was like I’d never really heard it before.
Discipline: “The practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience.”
Discipline: From Middle English, carrying the sense of “mortification by scourging oneself.”
Um, is this what we really want to be?
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We’re all so good at punishing ourselves and our creative efforts. We think our writing isn’t good enough. We think rejection means something true and objective about our value. We think we aren’t smart / poetic / funny / popular / _____ enough.
And where is all that discipline getting us?
What I want you to know today:
That there are other, more accommodating ways to relate to oneself while building creative strength.
Rather than aiming for discipline, you can aim to cultivate more curiosity. You can aim for showing up more often, and in less perfect circumstances.
You can experiment with routines that might serve you, and then change your mind the minute they don’t.
You can be so anti-capitalistic that you view rest and goofing around as parts of the creative process.
And you can work to become the most generous, engaging reader your writing will ever have.
What I want you to know today, and every day, is that discipline is an option you can opt-out of. And that good creative work—your work—can be fueled by accommodation, softness, and heart-centered devotion.