How to harness creativity by kicking impostor syndrome
And let go of comparison by sitting with discomfort
I’ve been finding myself talking about liminality and existence within liminal spaces a lot lately. It’s something that I've always been aware of, even if I didn't have the words to address exactly what that was (liminal was not in my vocabulary until a few years ago). Right now, it’s taking up a good amount of brain space (ironically) because I'm existing within these spaces so much: interrogating my past, its traumas and experiences, and how they've shaped me as an adult.
The space where childhood and adulthood are linked is arguably the most important liminality of our lifetime. I believe it’s a good thing to interrogate it, put it under the microscope. Challenge our childhood perspective against our enlightened adult one. That knife-edge space can teach us the most about ourselves, our resilience, our nature. Maybe the space is between what you want and what you currently have. Or what you had and what you lost. Possibly, it's a space between grief and relief.
Maybe it’s be the spaces between the facets of ourselves.
Listen to your jealousy
I'm a multidisciplinary artist: I’m a poet, a novelist, an essayist, now memoirist—and I don’t plan on stopping there. We all have dreams and aspirations; but sometimes it can feel like an enormous leap to get there. The truth is, like anything else in life, once you actually arrive and look back at how you got there, it feels like a much smaller leap. You can trace the path. But when you're on the edge of the precipice looking out, you just can't see that way forward. There's a great chasm in front of you. It's almost so overwhelming that it can stop us from taking the leap.
Fear stops us from sitting in uncomfortable spaces. It stops us from taking seemingly grand actions towards dreams because if we do, we're saying that we are worthy of them, right? We're saying that impossible, intangible, far-too-big-for-us thing is something we’re worthy of. We have the audacity to allow ourselves permission to take it. That’s when we hesitate and ask, who am I to want to take this for myself?
We worry how other people will react when we become this thing. There are countless people out there right now, stopping themselves short of fulfilment, or success, or growth—whatever it might be—satisfaction or even creative expression, by allowing their fear of uncomfortable spaces to win. I've been guilty of it in the past (heck, I let that voice win too often). We have this in-built knack for self-sabotage. It's an evolutionary safety switch. When we let ourselves predict how others will see us, let those childhood core beliefs in, it’s game-over. The imagined negatives already outweigh the potential positives. We are survivalists. That particularly applies for anybody who has struggled to find their truest, fullest identity. In my case? Who am I when I'm not defined by my family of origin, and the core beliefs that were established in my formative years?
As much as I'm ambitious, I’ve failed myself massively with a lack of self-esteem and self-worth. It can be developmental, it can be cultural, too: I sometimes think if I was born in the US, I'd probably be ‘there’ by now, wherever that is. In my experience, people I know from the US are far more likely to take risks, to travel, and to live in a country that’s not the one they were born in, or spent their childhood in. I commonly hear, ‘what’s the worst that can happen?’ I guess when you're told that you're the greatest country in the world, and therefore the greatest nation and thus the greatest people… you're going to be more open to expecting good things to happen. That mentality must remove a lot of the fear of what others might think (they’re too busy having their pie and eating it to notice us anyway). Whereas in the UK, in Scotland, it’s often seen as prideful to want to chase success, wealth, wellbeing, happiness. I’m sure we’re not the only culture that honours humility and the ‘be happy with your lot’ attitude (anyone else have this where you’re from?)
The smallest, most seemingly insignificant thing has triggered this thought for me today.
On my walk to the field—my morning ablution—I walked past one of my favourite little cottages. It’s a beautiful, quaint little cottage built from old stone, with a log-store outside and fronds of ivy draping the walls, hens pecking in the garden, the frost-covered hills rising up behind it—it's a proper postcard scene. Every time I walk past it the same thing happens: I feel an acute pang… a recognition of something I don’t have, do we call it jealousy? Or is it just self-insight? I don't know. I do know there's a real pain in being adjacent to things. Things we don't have but which we want, or things that we did have, but we've lost.
I've dreamed of living in a cottage in the woods since I was a kid. Years of holidaying at my uncle’s cottage—the gamekeeper’s cottage in a highland estate—instilled in me a strong sense of my connection with nature, and my appreciation of time to observe it, to be quiet and still with it. I dream of living in a place that’s quiet and a bit off the beaten track, which has elemental balance. Hills, trees, water and air. Somewhere you can hear the birdsong, to soothe your soul. (Did you know that studies have shown birdsong to be massively more effective at alleviating depression, anxiety, despair and trauma? Especially if it’s mixed species. You should read The Open Air Life by Linda Åkeson McGurk – it’s fascinating.)
I’m constantly reminded of the things adjacent to my own life. Whether that's people with gorgeous kids running around whenever we visit, or it's people that don't yet have caring responsibilities for their parents, who can go for hikes with their parents or on holidays to Italy—or even where they just pile over for Sunday dinner. It’s that beautiful cottage. I'm lucky that my small, modern, two-bed flat is in a place that allows me to come out and be in nature (most of these musings wouldn’t exist without it), but I see all these little recalibrations that I seek: to be a little bit closer to nature with a bit more space, to travel more, to do more of the things that give me freedom and joy.
When I look around at my fellow creatives, I think it's all easy, it's all happening for them, when in fact, they’re struggling in the same ways. And we learn this from our conversations, from opening up and sitting in a vulnerable place with others. In this industry, if you've never talked about the barriers that were up against you or the challenges that you face, or all the many, many times that you failed, or were not successful; then it makes you look like an overnight success, and a lot of people like that (especially their publishers). Anyone who’s been a while in the industry knows better. We all face an uphill climb, to varying degrees. I sometimes still think, ‘crap, will I actually make it?’ And it’s important to be honest about that, at all stages, because it's not an easy journey.
Align with your values (in all aspects of life)
I started off wanting to write and illustrate picture books when I graduated from uni in 2009. I gave it three years of developing my portfolio, this was when digital illustration was only just beginning to take off. So I was doing everything by hand. I had no money: I was still recovering from losing my family home in my final year, no way I was going to be able to afford Photoshop or a Mac or Lightroom, not even a lightbox or scanner—I could barely afford paint. All I could see was who was adjacent to me. And I couldn’t produce what they were producing. So I stopped. And I let my research into publishing take over. I got an internship at a publisher. Then at an agency. I became a bookseller. I was running events for some of my biggest heroes. Eventually, I worked up freelancing in marketing and events. At some point, around six years ago, I burnt out. I was overworking, but more than that, I’d strayed too far from the dream. And I needed to re-align with that.
I dropped everything. I had to figure out who I was, without deadlines, late nights, and pushing down my anxiety. I knew that I was really struggling but I didn't at the time know that I was autistic. I didn’t know either that I had connective tissue disorder that was causing a lot of pain and exhaustion. I’d been flat-out trying to keep my life together, tick off all the milestones, support my family, since I lost my home, that I hadn’t once stopped to draw breath and take a good look at myself. My frontal cortex was absolutely smashed to bits. I couldn’t string a sentence together and I was stuck on the sofa for weeks.
Just when I was getting to the end of my wits, the winds brought much-needed change and we moved out of the city grind. I discovered nature on my doorstep and I spent every single day walking farther and farther, and feeling closer and closer to myself. I continued with some journalistic work, reviewing events, which taught me how to throw a slant on something, shape an arc. I also was writing personal essays. One day, not long before we signed the papers on our new home, I realized that one of them felt like the seed of something bigger. I had no other distractions, so I decided to see if I could write fiction. I always wanted to write, stories were my jam.
I hadn't studied English Lit, I hadn't studied creative writing. I have a biomedical degree, and although my working in publishing gave me insight, it wasn’t the same as being taught. So I read. I paid attention to what I loved, what didn’t work for me. I knew I liked heart and truth, and cutting through the bullshit. Then I went for it. I wrote something that ultimately, I've become incredibly proud of. I've been so fortunate to learn from other writers, some really talented, incredible people that have given me their time and their energy (I’m looking at you, Deborah Bailey!)
It's when I aligned properly for the first time with like my inner self. I realised I did have what we might call talent or skill. And it wasn't learned in the typical sense, I learnt as I went: what works and what doesn't, about my voice and my kind of narrative and style, the way that my being autistic shapes my storytelling. I’m an empath, and that allowed me to write something that has a real live beating heart. I had to go through a massive journey of questioning whether I was valid or worthy enough to align myself with my heroes. Am I seriously considering doing the same thing as the very people that have inspired me and carried me through the hardest parts of my entire life? It’s a huge leap. A quantum leap; to align yourself with those authors you hold on a pedestal, who impact you so profoundly. That is HARD.
It’s vital that when doing this hard work, that you nurture yourself. Do more of whatever re-charges your batteries. Maybe it’s walking, reading, cooking, listening to your favourite podcast. Are you drawing firm boundaries? Make sure you’re filling the well faster than you’re handing out buckets. A soothed, aligned soul is far more capable than a frazzled, our-of-sorts one.
Harness the collective
Others won’t always make it easy. But we can’t let it get in the way of our truth and our path. It’s been a hard learned lesson as an autistic person, who thinks that everyone's intentions are good. Some people will just simply not want to see you succeed, for reasons of their own, and they won't be helping you on your way. One of the most helpful things I think we can do to aid us in scaling the mountain, is to make sure we're reaching out and pulling the people who are behind us with us. Shrinking the liminality between what’s been and what’s to come. Then it’s not this impossible leap on our own, rather we’re figuring out how to cross it, and we're just a bunch of people constantly laying the next plank, the next plank, the next plank, until we’ve built a bridge to the other side. It’s not a huge leap, just one foot forward at a time, together.
The sense of moving forward to a collective goal with others who are facing the same struggles and problems as we are, is FAR more enjoyable than trying to do it on your own. It's why I'm so grateful for the writing community that I have, and for this one growing. It’s why I’m determined to run retreats and workshops for people who are coming up the ladder behind me, and particularly people who are coming at this from a more unusual direction like I did.
Ultimately, there is such a reward in feeling the history of things. Being able to scale the mountain and look back and say, ‘ah, now I see how I got here’. And you know what's even better? You can see other people making that climb. They’re cutting all kinds of different routes.
It’s exactly how we should look at any adjacent things that give us discomfort. Maybe you’re right where you need to be and these things are here to show you what you really want in life. This is your path, and even if you’re the only one that walks it, that's okay.
Whenever the chasm looms again, just take a deep breath… and take the next step.
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How do you feel about this? What are your adjacent mirrors? Do you struggle on your path to being a writer? I’d love to hear from you x
This is beautiful written, thank you for sharing. I wasn’t trained in writing or literature (I’m a nurse by trade) so I can relate to feeling a bit “outsider.” I think I used to have this idealization of writers who had all this time to sit and contemplate and take their time writing leisurely, wandering, afternoons filled with exploration and inspiration.
Now that I’m a mother of a six month old, I’m writing more than I ever have and it’s nothing like I imagined. Furious typing during nursing sessions, stolen minutes to complete a wayward sentence, inspiration finding me at the grocery store or doctor’s office.
I think sometimes we’re waiting for different ingredients to create with rather than using what we have and realizing that’s the very definition of creativity.
Anyway, it’s a journey and none of us have it all figured out. But I’m glad we’re able to connect her and share our unique perspectives!