Finding creative confidence took saying goodbye to things I thought I didn’t have a choice about.
Sometimes in life, we need repotting as much as our plants do...
I don’t hear it so much anymore, but the words my brain would always put to a sense of anxiety were ‘I want to go home’. I’d think those words, whisper or mumble them wherever I was – including where I lived. I could think or feel that phrase as much in my own bedroom as I did at school, at university, or anywhere else in my world. Whatever home meant, whatever those words expressed my longing for, it wasn’t something as straightforward as a place.
The reason I don’t hear those words so much anymore – and that’s rarely, rather than never – is not simply about a place any more than thinking them was. It’s true I’m much happier in the place I live, the person I live with, and the people in my wider world than I was for a long time. It’s also true I feel physically safer; that I don’t miss the paper-thin walls, loudly aggressive neighbours, knife fight, subsequent police report, stalker, subsequent police reports, or the way the building shook during my front-row view of the Ealing Riots. Or even my student flat during my MA in Bath, with our (grade-two-listed) mice. Yes, there’s enough evidence to make sense that home hadn’t felt like a safe place for a long time. But I think the real difference is that I know what it feels like to be at home in me; that it’s not ever really about something as straightforward as a place.
Finding creative confidence took saying goodbye to things I’d thought I didn’t have a choice about. Activities and places that were unconscious habits, that weren’t serving me anymore. Sometimes in life, we need repotting as much as our plants do. And if we don’t have the creative confidence to acknowledge that, it can be unhealthy for our emotional roots.
There was no single, conscious moment I went from survival mode to creator mode; where I started to ask myself ‘What if I have a right to ask for what I want?’ and ‘What if I knew I had more power than I thought?’ The communities I approached and participated in were bigger, more outward looking, and I found more focus in my writing as well as in my life because I wasn’t waiting for permission, or trying to be interesting or worthy. I was listening to myself without judging, creating stories based on my interests and values. Being interested rather than interesting (First Draft Commandments, Your Creative Writing Toolkit).
Does creative confidence mean absolute self-belief? Nope, that’s egomania. And it’s often a cover for a total lack of authentic confidence.
Creative confidence means focusing on curiosity and possibility. On what you want to make and do, not what you fear it says about you. It gives you permission to work with the whole of yourself without needing to be perfect, or right, or sure of the result and the reception.
What and where means ‘home’ to you? What are the ways you return home, not simply to a place but to yourself?
All three of these Barnes/Putney images mean home to me in different ways:
The first is a local home-from-home I went to on Saturday. The second is a beautiful local image I’m lucky enough to walk past regularly but while I make my own stories I don’t know any more than that.
The third is literal home, and the most important one of all. Reset Day gives all the other days of the week the chance to be their most present, most engaged, whether I’m working or playing. Reset Day is usually my most creative too, both in a good way and in that it’s amazing how creative the excuses I come up with not to giving myself that time are! But I choose to notice that – and what we notice we have a choice about. So I choose to notice, and listen, and be as present with myself as I can so I can do the same with everybody else when the time comes to return to the world beyond my private one.
But now I know that it’s important and possible to feel at home at home, and that feeling at home in yourself is a perfectly good thing to want – as long as you don’t fear wanting it and ignore that objective instead of listening to it and moving towards it. Wanting to go home, and to keep going home, is a great thing to keep wanting.
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