Driving your creative practice
A picture of my blue Ford Focus in my apartment’s parking lot in Austin with a tabby cat sitting on the roof, smiling smugly because she knew something I didn’t! (read to the end to find out what)
When I learned to drive, much to my family’s horror, all I wanted was a little automatic car. I had no desire to learn to drive a stick or a Chevy Suburban (for some reason that’s still beyond me, my mother’s ideal car to learn to drive in resembles a tank more than a car). Fortunately we didn’t have a Suburban, so I couldn’t be forced into that in my busy suburban area, but I still mostly had to stick with my family’s learning-to-drive quirks. So, after what felt like endless driver’s ed, I got behind the wheel in the fall of 2000 of the old family minivan for the first time.
I begged to try parking-lot driving for my first time out. My mother insisted we didn’t need to start in a parking lot, but if I really was set on the parking-lot-learning thing, I could drive us to a parking lot. I protested; I got nowhere. So, as slowly as I could, I made the first left turn off my street. It was okay. I crawled up the next street, and just as I was turning, she reminded me that the next turn was on Route 1, a fairly busy road. I started the turn, but as I was turning I saw the bustle of Route 1, freaked out, kept turning, and ended up in my neighbor’s yard. And then I refused to drive for months.
It was only months later, after I tried again (not with my mother), that I found out why she assumed it would be so easy, why I wouldn’t need a parking lot. My mother grew up driving a tractor in a rural area. She already knew how to drive when she got behind the wheel of a car, so she assumed I would already know how to drive when I got in a car. But I had never driven so much as a golf cart.
Let’s be clear: nothing horrible happened as a result of my off-road detour. I dented some grass, but neither the car, nor the lawn, nor my person were really injured. I got my license when I was 16; I’m now 40 and I’ve never had more than a fender-bender-level accident. But the experience followed me around for years, as a thing that could happen behind the wheel. And, because my failure was so unusual, it became one of those stories my family told other people as entertainment, which didn’t help.
In short, even though my failure had no real consequences, it became part of the story I told me about me.
I could massively screw up in a way that no one else could even dream of, and that instead of getting help to fix it, I’d be mocked. The experience taught me that there might be a thing I didn’t know that doomed me before I started, and for a person already prone to anxiety, this was not a particularly helpful lesson for my brain or nervous system.
Driving seems easy once you can do it. But until you have the muscle memory of how to drive, every action you take is fraught with danger. Turn too little or too much, go too slow or too fast, merge wrong, forget how to drive in certain types of weather: any of these mistakes can cost you your car, your license, your life, in the worst case scenario.
But, hold on a minute.
What on earth could a bad first driving-experience have to do with making art, writing words, putting things you’ve made out into the world? Sure, cars are dangerous. But no one dies if you angle a paintbrush the wrong way or choose the wrong word.
This is empirically true. I know in my rational brain this is true.
And yet, I am not entirely sure that my nervous system knows this is true. For brains and nervous systems like mine, wires get crossed so that real danger, like crashing a car, doesn’t feel terribly different than failing creatively. A lifetime of seemingly small incidents build up, if not into diagnosable-level trauma, into mindsets that danger is right around the corner, and we need to constantly be on our guard to prevent it.
These glitches come from hypervigilance in our nervous systems, and what I’ve noticed in 40 years is that almost all of my creator-friends live much of their time in some sort of hypervigilant state, even if they wouldn’t describe themselves as having trauma or even severe anxiety. Whether they make “sense” as responses to life-events or not, the brain patterns persist, and the way hypervigilance most often shows itself in other artists I know is known as catastrophizing.
The Cleveland Clinic’s explanatory page on hypervigilance explains it this way:
“When a person catastrophizes,” Dr. Albers says, “they’re creating a narrative in their head in an attempt to understand a situation. But that narrative gets spun in a negative way.”
A hypervigilant mind tends to be preoccupied by worst-case scenarios. Not getting a call back within a couple of hours may get read as a sign that a loved one has died and a slow response to a message signals the end of a years-long friendship.
The tendency to catastrophize may make it hard to let one’s guard down and enjoy happy moments. When life is going really well, a person living with hypervigilance may find themselves anxious, waiting for the next shoe to drop.
So, even when our artistic lives are going well, our collective extreme fear of failure, inability to start projects because they might not be perfect, procrastinating because it feels like having control over the situation, etc, mean that we will eventually get stuck. If your brain turns a blank page or canvas into a “but what if I fail and everyone hates me” situation, that’s catastrophizing. (Seriously, no one will hate you for that. There might be financial or contractual consequences, but there won’t be hatred-consequences.)
When you’re hypervigilant and catastrophizing, it becomes nearly impossible to create.
And, in my experience, the longer I go without creating a thing, the harder it is to restart the engine and get going, like a car battery that’s sat unused too long in the winter.
I was in exactly this place when I started this blog post last week. I’ve been on a tear with my art—four collections in a month plus some commissioned work is an absurd production speed, even for me. But I had almost completely stopped writing. Everything I had written in August was me finishing a draft I’d started earlier in the year, not thinking of an idea and then creating something new. So when I sat down and looked at my open documents, nothing clicked.
And then my brain was off to the races.
What if I can’t get my brain to turn back on and write?
What if not writing every day broke my brain and I can’t do it anymore?
Why oh WHY did I stop when I had such momentum?
I’ve gotten stuck before after stopping for longer periods, so why didn’t I know better?
Ah, the rantings and ravings of the thwarted perfectionist impulse inside the hypervigilant brain.
Truth be told, there’s not much I could’ve done differently last month, for a lot of reasons. It definitely isn’t possible for me to do that much art and that much writing and still do other things like sleeping and eating! I didn’t stop writing because I’m a bad writer, I stopped to do other creative, equally worthwhile things.
But none of that mattered to my brain, which saw my being stuck after stopping a creative practice as a proof-text that I had failed and might now be a failure forever.
What’s a hypervigilant creative to do when they can’t get started on a new project?
If brain-hypervigilance and catastrophizing means we will sometimes end up stuck, how do we get our creative cars back out of the ditch?
In this particular case, I started again by looking at the survey research I’ve been doing on how people get stuck creatively (thanks if you’re reading this and answered my survey!), and journaled on how exactly I was getting stuck—and how frustrated I was—until I had an idea.
Starting a new project requires a somewhat different approach than continuing a project that’s already in motion (more on that later this week). There aren’t usually obvious places to start unless you leave yourself some breadcrumbs before you get there. Here are some of mine:
With any new project, whether its writing or art, I try to
Regularly journal about ideas, even if the journaling is grumpy af (that’s how I got this post started, after all—I compared my brain to mashed potatoes at the start of that journaling, so one need not even be positive for this to work)
Make lists of ideas for all sorts of moods
Create little snippets of projects that I don’t intend to finish right now—outlines, sketches, color palettes—so that when I need to start a new thing, I have some work already done
Keep work from previous projects that didn’t turn out quite right, and repurpose them into new work
If I’m really stuck, I try
Working on other people’s prompts and/or challenges (this is especially useful for getting out of artistic ruts for me)
Journaling about how I’ll never have a good idea until an idea pops up (again, mashed-potato brain)
Walking around—it’s annoying that exercise can help, but it can
Eating something, drinking water, having caffeine–it’s hard to drive on empty, to use another car metaphor
Even though making something isn’t nearly as straightforward as driving, you still need to be able to start, to stop, to change directions depending on where you want to go. It gets easier with practice, especially if you stay alert as you encounter obstacles that test your skills (like dodging the very not-alert people in the DC/Baltimore area who forget how to drive in snow every damned year). Actually making art gives you the confidence to keep making all the art, and, in my case, quiets the hypervigilant voice in my mind that tells me “but next time might be different.”
For so many of us, the hardest time to make things is right after we finish a cool project we’re really proud of. It’s like our confidence in our abilities to problem-solve disappear when we’re faced with a blank page.
This is why lists of what to do when our brain glitches are so essential. They’re like road signs, reminding us to slow down in a school zone or to be careful in the rain by a construction site. Mine might not all work for you, but in my experience, crowd-sourcing these tips is the best way to go.
If you got all the way here, here’s the final lesson from car-land:
The picture at the top? That cat lived outside near a house I lived in back in my PhD days in Austin, and was always on my little blue car for about six months. Then the semester ends, I get in the car to meet friends at a restaurant, and it won’t start. Turns out, I had a feline guardian because I had mice eating my sparkplugs.
So, if you REALLY can’t get started, consult your local cat to make sure you don’t have a mouse problem. Really can’t drive without sparkplugs!