The Role of Trust in the Creative Process
Yesterday, as I was reading and responding to JoVE’s comments on my post about Lists and Structure, something she said really impacted me. After her very insightful thoughts on non-linear strategy (which is a whole other post), she concluded with,
“The trick is to just trust your gut and start.”
Such a simple thing.
Trusting one’s self comes to us pretty naturally. It is an instinct we are born with. Unfortunately, we don’t receive a lot of training or encouragement in trusting our gut or leaning on our own intuition. As a matter of fact, from what I observe on a daily basis, a lot of us have pretty much had it drilled into our head from the beginning that the most important (and socially acceptable) thing you can do with instinct is suppress it. While this may work just great for fitting in and towing the line, it creates an internal discordance. And, depending on where you draw your creative energy from, it can wreak serious havoc on your process.
I have always considered myself a writer. From the time I was a very young child, this was the only thing I wanted to be. I wanted to write stories like the ones that populated my entire life and helped inform my internal landscape. When I finally got to the point where I was ready to be serious about it, I suddenly found myself floundering, struggling and gasping for air. Sitting down to write resulted in severe anxiety, surrounded by a cycle of fear and self-criticism. Finally, I just couldn’t write. Crippling panic would set in every time I sat down to do some work. Sometimes I could power through it, but more often I walked away feeling as if I had been beaten with a large stick.
It was as if the voice had been taken out of me. It wasn’t a sudden thing, by any means. I could feel her getting weaker and weaker until suddenly she was just silent. Occassionally I could force a little bit of something out of her, but mostly she was like a ghost in the background, barely visible.
While the temptation was to feel that this was something that had happened to me (why is the victim mentality so appealing?), I ultimately had to accept responsibility for my role in all of it, and accept that I was the one who silenced her. I was the one who never gave her room to speak. And then I wondered why I couldn’t write? Hmm…
Just a small step of initial trust has resulted in so much. And everytime I give her room to say what she needs to say, I can hear her louder and clearer and stronger. Every day she grows and grows and grows and someday, I won’t be able to contain her. What an exciting prospect.
Structure, I can see, plays an important part in making room for my voice. I sometimes use goals — daily, weekly, monthly, yearly — to help me create some of that structure. I start every day with a pen and an index card on which I write (hopefully) realistic goals about what I will accomplish. I have a notebook where I keep other larger goals and some of the smaller steps I need to accomplish those. There is a fluidity to these goals, because life changes and it is important to allow the journey to impose a little of its own structure, but there are larger goals that I don’t want to compromise on or lose sight of.
One of my larger goals for this year is to give my voice more room to speak. And really, this process of creating a room of my own, is a lesson in learning to trust myself. The end result, I can now see, will be more of an ability to “Just start.”
January 25th, 2006 at 10:12 am
Deep. and so true. In fact, one of the reasons why I have decided to take my daughter out of school is that it appears that the school system and much else in our ways of raising children is designed to teach us to focus more on rules and what others think we should do than on trusting our instincts. Which doesn’t mean I don’t think we need to be observant of what is around us and how our actions impact on others but that we need to do it in a more reflective and interactive way, rather than by following ‘rules’.
I don’t know if you saw the comment on my first homeschooling post by my friend Peter. He and I have often said that it took us until 40 to really work out who we were and what we wanted to do. This seems a shame. Particularly when you think that some folks know when they are small and don’t have that knowledge nurtured but actually have to struggle to do those things.
It isn’t just you who silenced your voice, although I recognize that you have agency in finding her again. But it is also the contexts in which you live — school and wider society — which make it difficult and downright discourage finding your own voice. Particularly if you are a woman.
January 25th, 2006 at 11:12 am
JoVE, once again, how right you are.
It has taken me well into 30 to really begin to understand who I am and to start believing what I want to do is possible. And this is a story I hear again and again. Then, of course, there is the whole dilemma of having entered the middle part of our lives without necessarily having received the training to accomplish such things and subsequently trying to find the time, energy, money and various other resources to figure that all out. Well, it can be downright tiresome… Albeit worth it in the long run.
Good clarification, also. It is much more accurate to say that I have agency in helping her have her say now. It was definitely circumstances of life and the accompanying training that worked to create the kind of environment where she didn’t feel she could talk or had anything worth saying.
I am a big believer in rules and the necessity thereof. But not rules for the sake of rules — rules because they make sense and help us all to live cooperatively together.
Anyway, thanks for sparking off such a powerful train of thoughts…
January 25th, 2006 at 12:58 pm
I’m enjoying this level of conversation and reflection. Helps me work through things to. For myself and for my kid.
January 25th, 2006 at 1:08 pm
As am I! This whole blogging pursuit continually surprises and delights me.
January 25th, 2006 at 1:08 pm
Glad JoVE made the point about school. “School”–the specific institution we have in the U.S., and sadly, many other places as well–was carefully designed to suppress instincts and mold conformity.
For a fantastic and frightening description of the intentions with which schooling as we know it was first designed, visit my teaching blog and scroll down to the green box in the right column. (I’m not just trying to plug the blog, but the quote is too long to paste here). Anyway, you have seen that school performs those functions not only very effectively, but also relentlessly, overwhelming the high hopes of individual teachers who enter the system hoping to do the opposite.
Schooling either succeeds in suppressing individuality and instincts in awful ways (I’ve sat watching a room full of kids in an AP Economics class, tense and hunched over their desks, furiously writing down every incredibly dull and pointless thing their teacher says as if their life depended on it, and wondered, “what the hell is wrong with you people?”), or it labels the un-suppressed persons in ways that hurt them for the rest of their life.
One of the more depressing things I’ve ever heard regards two supposed “learning styles” — concrete-sequential and abstract-random. Concrete-sequential is what it sounds like–linear, orderly, specific. Abstract-random is emotional, imaginative, active, constructive, connective, interactive… The depressing statistic was that most children are “abstract-random learners,” while most adults are “concrete-sequential learners.” One could interpret this as saying that “abstract-random” is immature (and I think that was the goal of the person who informed me that she was “concrete-sequential” while I was “abstract-random”) …but I interpreted it as saying that most adults have had all their imagination, connectivity, & creativity beaten out of them.
There’s a book called “Things That Make Us Smart” that talks about how computers are smart and how humans are smart. Computers are good at doing exactly the same thing over and over, with precision and speed. No human can do that as well as a computer. But humans are really brilliant at innovating, connecting, problem-solving, seeing implied or inexact patterns, inferring cause and effect–all kinds of “abstract-random” type tasks–things computers can’t do.
So basically we take our kids, put them in school, and train all their human brilliance out of them, substituting an imperfect inadequate approximation of computer smartness.
It’s painful to contemplate the scale of this destruction.
January 25th, 2006 at 2:13 pm
I remember sitting in my college world history class and listening to a lecture about the origins of public schooling and thinking to myself, “Oh, that explains a lot.” It was a pretty profound moment.
I am fond of saying that, as an institution, I don’t much care for public school, but I believe in the individuals who are there trying to work within that system to make a difference in the lives of people like, well, me. There were more than a few teachers along the way who truly saved my life.
I think that your child is very fortunate, JoVE, to have such an active and involved parent. For those of us who didn’t, I’m very grateful that people like Birdfarm are working to be educators.
As a side note, when I was in high school, I had to take one of those learning styles tests and I befuddled them by scoring equally in concrete sequential and abstract random. I always took that as a little tiny victory over the system. Now I can see that it was more than a little tiny victory. It meant I was managing to retain some of what they were trying to drill out of me…
January 25th, 2006 at 3:14 pm
Yay Rachel! They hate it when their stupid tests can’t pin you into some category. I presume you’ve read Franklin’s hilarious post about his career aptitude test — best of all he had the chance to confront the person doing the testing. That was glorious.
Thanks for the props about becoming a teacher. I’ll get there someday. I hope.
January 25th, 2006 at 3:45 pm
I did indeed read that post, and I also just had to read it again because you reminded me and it is so hillarious and just extremely gratifying!
Judging from the thoughtful comments you have contributed here and the remarkable insight and self-awareness I have seen on your blog, I would say that you are already a teacher in many, many different capacities. The certification and all that will come when it’s time.