Season 2 EP 4: 3 Steps to Reconnect with Your Creative Voice
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Perfectionist in Recovery
3 Steps to Reconnect with Your Creative Voice
Hello and Welcome back to the Perfectionist in Recovery Podcast! My name is Marcy Parks and I am a Perfectionist in Recovery.
For Today’s episode, I want to share with you 3 steps you can take to reconnect with your creative voice, but first, I want to take some time to thank you for being here, thank you for listening, and thank you for supporting this podcast! I get so much joy from sharing this podcast and creating a platform to support people in connecting to their creativity. That being said, I want to hear from you! This podcast is here to serve you, so I want to hear your feedback on how I can make this podcast better for you. Send me questions you want answered or topics you would like to hear discussed on the podcast! I have added a new feedback form on my website at www.marcyparksart.com/perfectionistinrecovery where you can go to submit feedback on the show, ask questions, and let me know if you want to be a guest speaker on the podcast. Like I said, your feedback makes this show more enjoyable for you to listen to, so go to www.marcyoarksart.com/perfectionistinrecovery and send me your feedback. That is also where you can find transcripts for every episode including links to websites for guest speakers and more.
And for those of you that already love the show, but want to continue to show your support, like, follow, or subscribe on whatever streaming platform you are using and leave a review! Reviews are one of the best ways you can support the growth of this podcast. You can go to www.marcyparksart.com/perfectionistinrecovery where you will find all the transcripts for each episode and leave a raving review of the show!
But once more, I just want to take a moment to again thank you so much for being here and for sharing your time with me today.
Now let’s get into it.
On today’s episode I want to share with you the 3 steps you can take to reconnect with your creative voice.
The reason I wanted to share this episode is because as an artist and recovering perfectionist on social media, there is a constant pressure to keep up with the fast pace of social media that has created such short attention spans. If we want our art to be seen, we have to be posting regularly. If we want to be posting regularly, we have to constantly be making art to share. But it is really easy to lose touch with ourselves and our own creative impulses when we are constantly making art with the sole intention of sharing and getting engagement.
And this doesn’t only apply to artists, or artists on social media. Anyone who may not identify as an artist, but wants to have a creative practice, may feel this pressure, too. Especially if you are someone that is somewhat active or present on social media. It is really easy to fall into the comparison trap when in the early stages of developing a creative practice and find yourself comparing your progress to someone else’s. Really, this can happen to anyone at any point in their creative practice.
But this is a topic that has been on my mind lately and that I have been struggling with myself and so I wanted to share a little bit about my own experience and some of the steps I have taken in order to reconnect with my own creative voice so that, hopefully, anyone else feeling this way can learn to identify their creative voice among the background chatter of social media and their own inner critic.
Recently, l have been struggling with the pressure to create and to share new work that was not driven by my own impulse to create new work. If you have been a long time listener of the podcast, you have heard me speak about finding and honoring your creative rhythm. When I think of my creative rhythm, I always think of a tea kettle. There is the rest and recovery period of my creative cycle where the kettle is filling up with water, then there is the inspiration period of my creative cycle where the tea kettle is heating up, and then there is the production period of my creative cycle where the tea kettle is whistling hot and ready to be emptied out. There is no real rhyme or reason to how long each period takes. Sometimes, it takes longer than others depending on what other outside demands there are on my attention.
My kettle has been in the heating up stage for a little while now. I have been feeling really inspired, but not quite ready to jump into the demands of the production period of actively creating work.
However, I have still felt an intense pressure to produce work. Not because I have felt especially inspired, but because when I spend any amount of time on social media, I am inundated with images and stories of people doing, producing, achieving, and accomplishing so much!
And this is why I say this can apply to anyone, not just artists, because this happens to everyone. You see someone sharing beach photos and suddenly you start thinking you need to book your next beach trip even though you hate sand, you see your friend sharing photos of a loaf of bread that looks so good you can almost taste it through the photo and now all of a sudden you start thinking you should be baking more even though you prefer cooking over baking, or you see someone else share their 6-pack abs they somehow managed to grow during the pandemic and now you feel like you need to renew your gym membership that you let lapse because you prefer to exercise outside or in your home.
Comparison is not exclusive to artists, it happens to everyone, but the voice of comparison is not your voice. The voice pressuring you to create and share your process is not the same voice that inspires your creation.
So how do we decipher which impulses are truly our own and which impulses are driven by comparison, self-criticism, and our aspiration to do everything “right”? How do we come back to our voice?
Three Steps to Reconnect to Your Creative Voice
Step One: Slow it Down
Part of what makes the background chatter in your mind so overwhelming is because it is all happening so fast. Life happens fast and it barely slowed down even during the peak moments of the pandemic. Not to mention, we have all been living in a hyper-vigilant state trying to survive the pandemic. Now, the US is starting to reopen again and the pace of life is starting to pick back up.
Step one is to slow down where you can.
This may look like:
Being intentional about meal times - don’t work through your lunch hour, sit down for breakfast.
Leaving a weeknight or weekend day free on your calendar.
Plan a long evening bath before bedtime.
Practice pranayama or breathing exercises.
Schedule open-ended alone time - time, even if it is only 15 minutes, out of your week where you have literally nothing planned and anything can happen.
The point is to pack moments of pause into your day
Step Two: Get Quiet
When my head feels too full of chatter, I get deliberate about getting quiet. For me, this looks like media breaks and lots of media-free walks.
Media breaks are hard, but so fruitful. If you want to do a media break intensive, this is when you plan a week where the following is off limits:
No music
No news
No books
No podcasts
No social media
Basically, during a media break, you remove all the external voices from your headspace for any given amount of time, but a week will have you feeling like a new person. Now, this of course is for someone who wants to do a super strict media break intensive, but that's not always possible for everyone. I know that is not always possible for a lot of people, like teachers or students who have required reading as part of their homework or careers, so you can tailor it to fit your needs. Maybe shorten it to a weekend over the summer, maybe only cut out social media and podcasts - the point is to plan for it and try it out. Play around with the concept and how you think it might benefit you the most.
Media-free walks are like the point of entry into media breaks. Media-free walks just means going for a walk without listening to anything or engaging with any media. I will usually keep my phone with me for time, but to keep the temptation of looking at my phone at bay, I will set a timer to go off that lets me know when it is time to go home.
Step Three: Start Listening
Y’all know what I am going to say here and if you don’t, you haven’t been listening to the podcast long enough.
JOURNALING!
Journal, journal, journal.
Get some paper and start writing. Open a new document on your computer and start typing. Whatever your preferred method - although with a computer the potential for distraction increases significantly.
The point is to get to writing. Write down whatever is on your mind, even if you feel like it doesn’t matter. A friend of mine describes this process as a brain dump - just offloading whatever is on your mind for the sake of making room.
How to do it:
Make a commitment to yourself - establish a set number days of the week/which days of the week you will journal
Set a deadline - Your journaling will be done by fill-in-the-blank-time of day
Give yourself boundaries - 3 pages minimum, or 15 minutes total time.
What happens as we journal consistently is that we start paying attention. When we journal and journal daily, we start to notice the recurring thoughts, common themes among passages, the pace of our writing, the curve and shape of our letters - that’s where you find your voice.
And for anyone who wants to start a creative practice, but isn’t sure how or where to start, these three steps are the foundation. By following these three steps, you can connect with the other ways in which your creativity wants to be expressed. For established creatives with longstanding creative practices, this is the way to keep your practice authentic and true to you - no matter what starts trending.
Ready to take the first step in your creative recovery?
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