Amena Brown:
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to a new episode of HER with Amena Brown. I took a break for the holidays and I hope you got to take a break too. And welcome to 2022. I don't know if you also feel a little shy or reticent. If I want to bring a spelling bee word into our conversation. Feel a little reticent this year about whatever your normal beginning of the year rituals are. Many years ago, I used to be a person that would do all of the goal setting. I had different questions I'd ask myself about the year prior, and then I had a different set of things that I would use as my sort of goal setting for the next year. And then... Hey mom. Some shitty things happened. And when those things happened, it was sort of like my ability to goalset kept changing and changing and becoming less and less defined in a certain way. So I went from being a super goal setting person to then becoming a person that did vision boards.
Amena Brown:
And I had read an article by Martha Beck several years ago, where she talked about intuitive vision boards. Because I started out basically taking my goal setting that I was doing in my journal or whatever, and bringing that over into vision boarding, which basically meant I was looking through magazines for very specific pictures of things and lines and words and different things to sort of make a visual representation of what I would've written down as my goals. Right? Okay. Well, then some other shitty things happened. Which sometimes after those things happen, you do have a period where you can have a little moment of a laugh, like, "Ooh, that was actually really terrible. And I made it through that." But I think I ended up having some really hard things happen that were connected very much to the things I put on my literal vision board.
Amena Brown:
And then after that year, I remember a very particular year that it was painful to look back at my vision board because of how some things had happened that year. So then I decided after reading Martha Beck's article about intuitive vision boarding, which would basically be like you look through magazines or whatever you're using as your fodder for what's going to become your vision board. And she would say, look through the magazine and just pick out the words or images that you feel drawn to. And so far that has been my favorite way of vision boarding when I did that. However, when we came into 2020, and I think by the time I got to 2020, you can tell that some harder are things happened in life. Right? Because then I went from intuitive vision boarding to just picking one word for the year. And I don't remember what my word was for 2019, but my word for 2020 was surprise.
Amena Brown:
And I'll tell you all, 2020 surprised all of us in some ways that we did not want to be surprised. So going into 2021, I really don't remember if I did any sort of goal setting rituals. I don't remember if I did that. I know I didn't do a vision board. And I don't know that I had a word because I normally remember the word. So, I feel like 2021 was just like, "well, I'm here." So I don't know what my 2022 energy is yet. I'm still figuring that out. Maybe you are too. But I had an episode idea that came to me. I believe it was either 2021 or in 2020. And I wanted to talk to you all about how to survive a creative block, but you all, I was so emotional about it and my assistant and I, we meet and we talk over a lot of these episodes and my husband's my producer. So we talk over a lot of the episodes.
Amena Brown:
And this was one episode idea that every time I would approach the time that I said I was going to do it, I would get so teary that I just knew it wasn't time, it wasn't time, it wasn't time. As I was thinking about what's going to be the episode to open up this year for our living room. This episode idea came back to me. And for the first time I didn't feel like totally ugly crying when I thought about it. And so I thought, "Well, maybe this episode is ready now." So I thought as we are beginning the year and shout out to my recovering perfectionist out there, trying your very best not to give yourself 10,000 things to do in a year that only has 52 weeks. Right? I want to talk about what do we do when we find ourselves in a creative block and many of you are probably familiar with the term writer's block. Right?
Amena Brown:
So I want you to know I'm taking writer's block and broadening it so that it also applies to you, whether you are a writer or not. It could apply to whatever creative work you may find yourself doing. But creative block is very real. And I have been in one for a very long time. I have been in one more than once in my life. I'm sure I will experience it again. And so I thought I wanted to give you a few tips on how to possibly navigate that. So I want to talk about some caveats first, because it is the beginning of the year. This can be a time that we take our goals and our things that we are trying to achieve for the year and a venture to say a lot of the time we are potentially setting ourselves up for the fall by having too many things to accomplish or having things to accomplish that we've given ourselves not enough time to actually have an opportunity to do.
Amena Brown:
So, I want you to know that that will not be the spirit of this episode. The spirit of this episode is to come up with some ways that can be helpful to you without you feeling like you have been beat upon emotionally. Couple of caveats I want to give you. Caveat number one is we're still in a pandemic. And I want to give a shout out to my friend Leigh because there are a lot of times that I talk with her because she knows that I'm a recovering perfectionist. There are a lot of times I talk with her that she has to literally say that sentence to me. And we are also in the middle of a pandemic. So she'll say to me, whatever you did do or did get accomplished is good and is worthy of celebration. No matter what you had in your mind that you thought you could complete or finish because being in a pandemic, whether we talk about it a lot, whether we return back to normal in certain ways, it still affects us. It affects our ability to complete certain task.
Amena Brown:
It affects our rhythm of life. It affects us in a lot of ways that we may stop talking about because it's been going on so long and we're just trying to find ways to sort of move past it or whatever. But I do want to give us a reminder here that it is January 2022, and we are still in a pandemic almost two years now. So that is my one caveat that when we're talking about what we do about creative block, one of the first things we're going to do is give grace to ourselves and acknowledge the external circumstances that may be at play. Right? That may also affect our internal creative processes. And my other caveat is I really want this episode and our time in the living room today to be about how we can enter the new year gently.
Amena Brown:
This is a rhythm that has not been natural to me. It's not something that I would have done 10 years ago or five years ago, but the last two or three years of my life have taught me more about what it means to have a gentle rhythm. And so I have chosen to come into 2022 gently. And what does that mean? I mean, as we talk about these things, inevitably, we're going to get into conversations about productivity and all this stuff. As we delve into that, I want you to think about how you can and be gentle with yourself as the new year is starting. This is not a time for you to beat yourself up about the things that you didn't get done last year and now you need to dump those things on yourself now at the beginning of the year. This is not a time to speak negatively about the body that you are in and all of whatever other assundry goals you may feel like you need to have because you are underneath it all being mean to the body that you have. Right?
Amena Brown:
This is a time to be gentle with ourselves physically, emotionally, creatively in all the ways we can. So, I want you to think about that as we're talking about creative block and our creative processes, how can you enter the new year gently? I know we have a lot of ideas about hit the ground running and going to kill these goals and murder them. I don't know why we have to be violent to our goals, but anyways just what are some ways you can take a walk into the life that you want for yourself? Right? Okay. So how did this idea come to me to want to talk to you about this on an episode? So this started out with a tweet and I tweeted a while ago, how do you return to the love of writing? And I don't tweet very often, but I was just very curious about this and I was curious to hear about it from other writers.
Amena Brown:
And I got a mixed bag of responses as would be expected on Twitter. So, some people had a lot of really wonderful tips to give, different things that they do to sort of keep themselves inspired. And of course, inevitably there were some answers in the thread and from people that quote tweeted the thread with their responses. There were some answers in the thread that started giving me some sort of visceral, like, I couldn't tell what my deal was. I was like, I don't know if I'm like... I feel like I'm kind of angry a little bit. And then I kind of feel like I could cry. And so then I got off Twitter and started to process this with my husband. And of course, started to ball my eyes out. Just cry, cry, cry, because I think a lot emotionally for me was underneath that question.
Amena Brown:
And of course, as we know about social media, people on social media are most of the time not thinking about what could be bringing you to ask about these things or they're not thinking about how they could be tender with you or be mindful of you. They're just taking what you've asked at face value and answering based on their own perspectives. Right? And I realized first of all, the part that was starting to make me feel enraged, the pandemic has also brought me that more of a sense of rage. But the part that was making me feel enraged was I felt rooted in some misconceptions about writing, about creative work and creative works relationship to the term discipline. Right? So there were some people that were like, "Well, sometimes you just need to take a break from writing." I go on a walk, I go talk with someone I love, I do these things.
Amena Brown:
And then it was like the other half of the thread or the timeline was like, "You don't need to be really getting into all this emotional stuff, you just need to go write. You just need to go do that." And I want to tell you all a side story without name dropping. I don't want nobody really trying to get involved with what I say about them on this podcast. So I'll just tell you a very well known New York Times best selling white male author. I was at a conference with him many years ago and he said to me, now I will admit to you that I had an author crush on him at the time. I loved his books and I'm sure some of you may know who it is, but I'm not telling you unless you have my actual cell phone number. Anyways.
Amena Brown:
So I loved his books. And there was just a lot about what he wrote that I really loved and felt represented some things about our generation. And I don't know, he was a big deal to me at the time. He was a big deal to a lot of folks at the time. And I had this opportunity to be in a green room with him at a conference. And I thought, well, I'm here with him I should ask him some writing advice. And so I asked him whatever my quintessential writing question was. And he said, "Well, you need to treat writing the same way that a plumber treats his work." He was like, if a plumber gets a job, they just go there and do the plumbing every day. It's not an emotional act for them. They just go and they work on the pipes, they do whatever's required for the job and they leave.
Amena Brown:
He was like, "You'll be more successful approaching, writing like that." And for many years, you all I tried to follow his advice. And now I think that that is very bad advice. Or I guess I should say, I don't think that advice is for everybody, maybe for some people that works, but I am a person whose creative work is very much attached to my emotions and feelings. And to the extent that I start detaching my emotions and feelings from my creative work, then it's not going to feel like me and it's not going to feel true and it's not going to authentic. Right? And he was also a writer that was one of those people that recommends that you go to a cabin and write. And that is always really laughable for me because I'm like, who in their regular life has in addition to their house, a cabin? Where am I going? In Vermont? What am I doing? Where is that happening? Right?
Amena Brown:
So I think there are a lot of misconceptions to me about how creative work works. And I think there can be this tendency to sort of speak to, or speak about people who do creative work as if they are inherently lazy. And as all they do is procrastinate. Now, listen. Okay. Let's just start with the fact that I know creative people do procrastinate. Some of us might be lazy, right? But I do think that might be oversimplifying the situation. And I think that's not helping us care for our souls in the creative process, because for many of us, our souls are very attached to that. And it's our souls that help us make, that help us create things. So when we talk about the misconceptions between writing and discipline, I think the go-to answer whenever a creative person is like, "I'm having writer's block. I'm having a hard time getting my ideas out. What should I do?"
Amena Brown:
It's like the go-to answer is always, well, you should do more. You should get up earlier. You should spend more hours. You should do all this long list of things. You should go to the mythical cabin. You should go to bed at 10 and wake up at 1:30 AM and write during that time. There are always these very wild and a lot of times for a lot of people, unsustainable ideas about how writing or creative work actually work. And I want to submit to you that I don't believe the answer to most problems that creative people have, is that you're not doing enough. Because a lot of us that do creative work have some sense of a belief inside that we are not enough or that we are always not doing enough, some of us. Right? And so for a lot of us who have those feelings already, we take in a lot of those ideas that I would consider to be sort of toxic productivity, right?
Amena Brown:
That our worth or our worthiness as a person is in how much shit we get done and how quickly we do it and how early we woke up. And I think when you get too caught in that, you might be losing the soul of the process. And if you're listening to this and you're like, "That is my process. That's what gives me life," then that's what your process should be. I think the thing is creative process is different for each person. It can be different for the same person in different seasons of life. So we should have that sort of flexibility for how we approach what we're doing and what we do when we're having a hard time doing the thing that we love.
Amena Brown:
So I want to talk about first of all, reasons that you may experience creative block. And I'm really digging under here are beyond the reasons that I said earlier, right? That people are like, "Oh, you're just not putting in enough time." You're not doing enough is basically the answer. I want to dig underneath there beyond those things. And the first thing, not that I am trying to bring sadness into the chat, but we do have to talk about it, is grief. And grief is a mini layered experience in our lives because there are a lot of things that can bring grief into our worlds. Right? It could be the loss of someone, it could be the loss of a relationship. It could be the loss of an opportunity. It can come up and pop up in so many different ways. And unresolved grief has been my creative block a lot of the time.
Amena Brown:
And the thing is, if you're experiencing grief at this moment in your life, the reasoning that you need a cabin, that you need to be doing more, that you need to get up earlier, that you need to push yourself and put in more hours. None of that makes sense to the brain and soul and body that is experience grief. Grief will certainly become a creative block. I wish I could remember the thread or that I kept track of it, but there was a writer around the time that I had submitted my question. And I don't even think it was someone that I follow. I think it just showed up on my Twitter timeline because some other people that I follow had liked some posts on the thread, but someone who was a writer had posted that they had experienced a loss of a loved one and they asked people on Twitter that were writers after loss, how long did it take you to return to writing?
Amena Brown:
And I went through the thread because I've experienced a lot of grief myself, some related to losing people that I loved, but some related to other just personal hard things that happened in life. Right? And reading through the thread was actually comforting to me in a way, because there were a lot of people on there, like, "Oh, it took me a year. It took me a year and a half to return to writing after losing a parent or losing a partner." Right? And I think it's interesting because when we are succumbing to the ideas of toxic productivity, we are being made to think that we should be getting over things pretty quickly, that we should be returning back to "normal." Right? And there are some things that we're going to experience or go through that will make us different and we should not expect ourselves to return immediately back to that normal.
Amena Brown:
Another thing that I wanted to tell you all could be a reason why you may experience a creative block, which still, I feel like all these things I'm about to say have grief connected to them really. But the second thing I wanted to say is grappling with the fear of failure, the fear of success, or grappling with an experience of failure or an experience of success, which feels very wild, but is true. You can experience creative block because you did a creative project or worked on something creative and it didn't do well. And however that's defined, maybe it didn't numerically do well, maybe at your job it didn't receive the support that you thought it was going to receive, or whatever those things are. Right? It didn't happen the way we wanted it to. It wasn't celebrated the way we hoped it was going to be. Experiencing that can also cause creative block, because then you feel afraid as to if I have done my first art show, just as an example. You all know, I don't do visual art, but I'm just using this as an example.
Amena Brown:
If I've done my first visual art show and none of the pieces sell and the reception wasn't that great and there weren't a lot of people who showed up to it, then my confidence in my work and in myself approaching my second time doing a showing, will be low and it will be hard sometimes for us as creative folks to conjure that up. And then sometimes it's really hard for us to dig into what did we feel disappointed about when we put out thing and it didn't do what we thought it was going to do. But if we're going to be able to move forward from having a creative block, we cannot leave these emotions and feelings and experiences unprocessed. Right? You could also be grappling with success. This has happened to me with few of my poems where I wrote a poem and it started doing really well. I was doing that poem in front of different stages earlier on in my career, recording this poem with different artists and just seeing people respond to it.
Amena Brown:
And then when it came time for that season to change, and it was a season of writing, I had to get past those feelings of what if I never write a poem like that one again. And what if all the other poems I write are not as good as that? And we know that staying in that type of thought will totally keep you from being able to create, because now you are comparing yourself to your past self versus being able to come back to whatever your version of the blank page is with curiosity with this openness to see what will the you of today want to make versus what the you yesterday or two years ago, or whatever made. Also, I do want to talk about going through trauma or going through something that's so hard that you have entered into a survival mode.
Amena Brown:
And I think this is really important also because for some of us, I know some people in my life that are caretakers of someone who is sick or is not well. And in order for them to take care of that person, they have to be in a survival mode. I know some people that have chronic diagnoses that they've received or have diagnoses that they've received that are going to involve a lot of difficult treatment, a lot of difficult meds. Right? That puts you in a place where you enter a survival mode, which means now so many other things start to feel like a luxury. Right? When you're in survival mode, you're just doing everything you can to make it through the day to make it through the week, to make it to the end of the month. And when you're in survival mode, yeah, it can be very hard to be creative during that time.
Amena Brown:
And again, that's another time in your life that somebody telling you to go away to a cabin when you may be broke and you may not be able to afford to take some trip somewhere else so that you can have a break. You may literally be going through a time in your life that you're not going to have that break and you're not going to have another place that you can go to. Right? So I think it's important to speak to that because whenever we give sort of... And when I say we, I mean the people who have podcasts, have social media platforms. Whenever we "give advice to people" and we're like, "Oh, you just need to..." It's really never that simple. Right? And the last reason which seems simple, but I do think it's a factor is just pure exhaustion, not really having had time that you've rested, whether that means sleep or whether that means just time that you weren't having to pull on the part of yourself that your creativity would be coming from. Right? These are reasons you may be experiencing creative block.
Amena Brown:
Okay. So what do you do when you experience creative block? And one of the things that I want to say to you that I think is so important is that you should remember that when you experience creative block, never forget that your healing is more important than your output. And the truth is, especially for those of us who also work in creative world, your clients are not necessarily going to say that to you. The team that you work with may not necessarily say that to you. Your boss may not say that to you, but it is true. Your healing is more important than your output because at the end of the day you only have one you. And you have to take care of yourself. The amount of albums you put out, the amount of paragraphs or stances that you write, the amount of design that you can say you completed, the amount of photography that you can say you've done. All those things are not more important than your health all around.
Amena Brown:
And we can think of examples ad nauseam of people, whose art we love. Right? But we lost them sooner than we wanted to because their output unfortunately became more important to the people around them than their health or their healing. So, that's my first thing what to do when you experience creative block, remember that, and think about, are there things in your life right now that are wounded? Do you have these areas of life where you have all this unprocessed grief, unprocessed disappointment, unprocessed time that you've been in a survival mode? And I want to say, I feel like I'm always a both/and. So here's my both/and. I want to say on the one hand, sometimes you need to heal before you can create. And I think this is different for every person. So you have to find which one of these people is you. But a lot of times for me, I'm not a cathartic creator. I'm not someone that when I'm going through stuff, it's my writing that I pour that into or it's other art that I pour that into.
Amena Brown:
For me, I don't actually emotionally multitask very well. So, for me sometimes I have to take some time to heal and then return to the creative process. And it can also be true that there are some people that it is creating that is a part of your healing process. It is being creative that is a part of the way that you begin to process grief or process trauma or process things that have been disappointing to you or hurtful to you, or even sometimes process things that have been really amazing and you just don't even know how you process that at the moment. That can also so be true. I think you also have to release yourself from toxic productivity. I think we could all for 2022 stand to do more of this. And is toxic productivity connected to a lot of things? Yes, it is connected to capitalism. It is definitely connected to white supremacy.
Amena Brown:
It is baked in a lot of our, those of us that live in the states here. It's baked in a lot of our American way of being, it can be baked into a very Western way of being, but we need to release ourselves from that and find ways to do that. I'm going to talk about that a little more later. Another tip I'll give you of what to do when you experience creative block is to take in the creativity of other people. This isn't always to take in their creativity so that you can be like, "Oh, let me take that and just make this thing they made." That's not what I mean when I say that. But I mean, it can be helpful to take in the wonderful and beautiful and fascinating and provocative things that other creative people have made.
Amena Brown:
And I'll tell you what it does for me, because sometimes of course, our ego is connected to our creative process. Right? We bring our ego into the room in some ways. And some of us have to do that. Right? Some of the art we make, we have to have some ego. We have to have some confidence about it, or why would we do what we're doing if we didn't have a little bit of that? But I think there are times that we end up putting too much pressure on ourselves as if the whole world is going to crumble if we don't fill in the blank with whatever your art is. So for me, the whole world's going to crumble if I don't finish this poem, the whole world is going to crumble if I don't come up with an amazing podcast idea. The whole world is going to fall apart if I don't paint this the exact right way, if I don't design this the exact right way, if I don't make this film the exact right way, right? And I think that's putting too much pressure on ourselves.
Amena Brown:
And I will tell you one thing that I've started doing, adding to my routine as I started taking very small steps back into my writing process, is I've started adding just a few minutes of reading to that time. And I have other times that I read, but I have very specific books that I like to read before I'm about to write. And I just had to start out really, really small. So I think I started out where of those books I would put my timer on and maybe read for five minutes or 10 minutes. Typically, no longer than 10 minutes. And one of the books I'm reading right now during my writing time is I'm reading Black Women Writers by Claudia Tate. I don't even know if this book is still in print because I found it at a thrift store, but boy, is it wonderful because Claudia Tate is interviewing a lot of amazing Black women writers. And I think the book came out either in the late seventies or early eighties. So you're seeing these interviews with Maya Angelou and ugh, I mean so many amazing Black women writers in this book.
Amena Brown:
And even reading that book for 10 minutes, it did a thing to me that I didn't think it was going to do. It actually calmed me down and helped me to take less pressure off of what happens when I write, because reading about these Black women and thinking to myself, in my family, in my bloodline, I am a part of a long line of women that have had a wonderful and amazing and difficult and complicated lives, right? And there are so many strides that they made in their own lives that have paved the way for me. So in certain ways, that is a part of what gives me the confidence to do what I'm doing, that I know these women paved the way for me. I hope that in my lifetime I'm paving the way for the other folks to come after me. But creatively, I think that can be helpful too.
Amena Brown:
There was something about me reading the words of these Black women, that they were actually writing some of them around the time that I was born and thinking to myself these are geniuses. These are Black women who are just brilliant and their work had such an impact the world. And that means my charge is to come to the page or to the creative process and be myself because these women have come before me, I need to come to the page the same way that they came to the page as they are, as who they are with their ideas. And I don't know you all, something about that just helped me to relax a bit and take the pressure off of myself that it's not that the world's going to crumble if I don't write this poem, it's that I want to write this poem because it's important to me to say, or because I have something funny to say, or because I hope me writing this will bring somebody else a laugh about the absurdity of life or whatever is bringing me to that writing process. Right?
Amena Brown:
So take in the creativity of other people, because it can remind you that as a creative, you are a part of a community of people making things. It is not all on your shoulders to make all the things it's on your shoulders to be exactly who you are to make what you have in your hands, in your mind, in your soul to make. And the last thing I would say what to do when you experience creative block, just start small and try. You might even cry the first time you come back to it. You might not write anything or create anything or draw anything that you think is worth anything at all, but just start small and try. Those of us who are writers talk about the idea of... And I'm not sure whose quote this is. But this idea of sort of writing with the door closed and then you edit with the door open to mean that you have a certain part of your process as a writer that is just you and the page there.
Amena Brown:
And then you get to a point where you can open up what you've made to an editor or to other people to get perspective, to get feedback or whatever. And I think sometimes we can get to a point where, especially between social media and all these other things that there's so much of what we create that immediately is out there to the public, that then it can feel challenging to sort of close that door again and go back to where it's you and your voice and your stories and your creativity and your ideas in the room. But go back and start small. Even if you just can only do five minutes of sketching, or you can only do five minutes of beginning a little bit of choreography or whatever the creative thing is you do, just start small and try. And when you start small, don't let yourself feel beholden to how what you're making will be in the public, or how it will be received when it's out there.
Amena Brown:
It's also okay to make things that nobody ever sees or to make things just because you want to see where it goes. And I think when we start sort of taking all of the faceless voices and eyes out of the room with us, then we can really return back to our true process. I want to speak quickly before I end the episode about what to do about creative block when work is your livelihood. I want to speak to my freelancers, my entrepreneurs, my artist entrepreneurs, my people who work for creative agencies and work for companies where you also are doing creative work there. What do you do when you're experiencing creative block? Because even though I don't believe in said white man author's thing about the plumbing, when you do creative work for a living, you don't always have the luxury of being able to be like, "Wow, I'm tired and I don't want to do this right now." Because your rent or your car payment or your insurance or whatever bills you may have are connected to whether or not you can conjure up this creativity, right?
Amena Brown:
So here are some tips for you. Find one small way this year to create something just because you want to. For those of us who do creative work as our livelihood, or as our job or a vocation occupation, whichever way you refer to it, I think we can become well known for being able to take what other people want to make something creative. And we can do a really great job taking their ideas, their initiatives or whatever it is, and making it amazing. And then we look up and we are so drained that we don't have the energy anymore to really do something, just because we want to, just cause we want to experiment with it, we want to see how it turns out. We're not sure, we don't know all those things. Right?
Amena Brown:
I want to speak a little bit about the cycle of making things we love and then clients loving what we made and then ending up getting paid for the thing that we started doing because we loved it. Right? And then somehow it sort of feels can not always, but can feel a little tainted, a little corrupted, right? That you are like, "Oh, I started out doing this thing just because I wanted to, well, now it's part of my job to do that thing. Or now a client has seen me doing that thing and they want that exact thing." and so then that becomes a part of the business. And sometimes that also gets disconnected from what you loved about what you were doing in the first place, which is a really hard cycle, right?
Amena Brown:
So I want you to think about, you may have made something that then led to you getting to where you could do this as your livelihood, which is an amazing opportunity to have if you get this opportunity. It's great. It's great sometimes. Mostly. It's great to be able to have the opportunity to do what you love and make a living at it if that's something that you always dreamed of doing. But it's also okay to think about some ways to return to what you loved about that before there were clients, before there were brands to partner with, before all of that. How do you return to the roots of what you're doing? For me that was going to open mics and hearing other poets in the city. I traveled a lot. Most of my performances were travel for a very long time.
Amena Brown:
So there was something good for me about returning to the roots of spoken word in Atlanta and getting to sit and listen to other poets, getting to take my new stuff that I was still working the kinks out of. That's one way that I go back to the roots of what I love. So think about that for yourself. And another thing I would say for my people that this is your job job. One thing that you can do about creative block when your creative work is your livelihood, is think about how to institute more rhythms of rest into your work. Think about how to not have your rhythm of work or your pace of life in your job to be where your creativity is constantly you being pulled on without you having an opportunity to pour back into yourself.
Amena Brown:
So when I say rest, yes, I mean sleep as well. Yes, I mean taking vacation time when you can take it or stay vacation time, even if you can't afford to go somewhere, can you afford to stay at your home, but have some days where you're not having to constant be pulled on by all the people that want, want, want from you. And lastly, for everybody, whether you work in a creative field or not, whatever your creative art is, find small ways to return to what you love and why you loved it in the first place. I want you to think about that for a minute. Think about creative thing that you miss doing the most or that you remember loving doing the most and think about the you that just was starting out. For me, I can think about the girl that went to her first open mic when she was 19 years old and heard some of the most amazing poetry she'd ever heard in her life and also realized how bad her poetry was all at the same time.
Amena Brown:
And how I went home that night after that first open mic feeling so charged up to write and write better and perform better and having this willingness to keep showing up, even though I was going to stumble and fumble and mess up and forget my poem, I was trying to memorize, go back to those roots for yourself in whatever way and find small ways to return to that. I believe the same thing about creativity that I believe about cooking. We talk about this a lot. Those of us who grew up eating soul food, that's a very like very Black community central idea that when we make soul food, what makes it delicious is yes, someone who can technically cook, right? But it's someone who puts the love in it when they cook. And you want to feel that feeling when you're are being creative.
Amena Brown:
You want to be putting the love in it. And if you've gotten to the point where you're not putting the love in it, I hope you'll go back and think about what's causing that block for you is a period of resting and not making what you need is therapy. What you need is time with your friends who are not super concerned with whatever you do at work. They just love you for you. Is that what you need? Whatever you need, take care of yourself this year, go gently into the year, go gently into your goals, be kind to your body, be kind to your past self, be kind to who you are right now. That's the way we start the new year. See you all next week. HER with Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network and Partnership with iHeart Radio. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.