Marrying Your Creativity

MarlonLeave a comment

Managing your creativity is a lot like managing a healthy marriage. They both start off with a honeymoon period where everything is fun, fresh, and exciting, but then the prospect of living happily ever after gets challenged when reality starts to set in. You knew it couldn’t always be rainbows and unicorns forever. When the dust has settled and the initial excitement is gone, you are then left with confronting some challenging aspects of your project. And in turn, if you have any sense, confronting your own demons in the process as well.

Today, we’re going to take a look at how you can manage your creativity in the same way so that you don’t end up with the proverbial divorce, or at the very least, unhappy marriage that you feel stuck in. Once you understand how the phases of a project mirror the phases of a marriage, and how cyclical they actually often turn out to be, the better equipped you’ll be with committing to your creativity with all earnestness instead of committing to it out of necessity, or worse, outright abandoning it.

There are three phases in a creative project that mirror a marriage and they are:

  1. The Honeymoon
  2. Slap From Reality
  3. Renewing Your Vows

The Honeymoon

The Honeymoon is every creator’s favourite part and wish could last forever. And how could you not? Little to no effort is required. All you gotta do is sit back and relax enjoying the company of your favourite person in the world. Likewise, with a creative project, getting to work on it at the beginning can feel so effortless because you’re overwhelmed by your excitement for the novelty of a fresh new idea, so you hit the ground running and work at it to your heart’s content, and sometimes even to the point of burn out.

But what if I told you that despite of how great this phase is in a project, it’s actually not the best part of it? It’s definitely there to entice you and motivate you to accept all cognitive demand it may require. Whether you’re writing a novel, composing a song, or painting a picture, you know that it takes a lot of patience and focus to create. It just doesn’t feel that way because the initial euphoria of stumbling upon a fresh new idea makes the difficulty of its conception feel easy breezy.

Much like in a new relationship or a marriage, you look past the red flags and do your best to keep the peace because you just want to bask in all the positives of your partner. Likewise with your project, you want to build it up in your mind as this next best thing that your genius has conjured up, so you’re bound to look past its flaws and maybe even your own flaws as a creator.

Until, of course, you get a…

Slap From Reality

After several weeks into a project, you start to see where it may not be the greatest thing after all. Maybe you have a plot-hole you’ve yet to figure how to cover up. Maybe an entire section of your song bogs down the pacing. Or maybe you have some bland colours that aren’t really making your image pop the way it should be popping. Whatever the case may be, creators are always confronted with the things their ego begin to remind them of: you and everything you make will always have fundamental flaws in them.

And so the resistance becomes stronger. Your initial passion for the project begins to wane and you wake up less and less excited each morning to tackle it. Instead of wanting to do it first thing in the morning, you shy away from it, anxious and exhausted merely from avoiding it. You might even start to feel guilty for doing so and the sunk cost fallacy makes you believe that you might as well continue ignoring your problems because if you’ve already gone this long on procrastinating, what are the chances of actually recovering if you gave it a shot now?

Well, you never know until you try is what I always say. In my opinion, this slap from reality is actually the best part of the creative process. Many people fear it for being difficult, but growth is found in overcoming difficult obstacles. And in order for you and your project/marriage to grow, you’ve got to be willing to fight for what you once had and breathe new life into it. You made a commitment and you’ve got to be willing to see it to the end, and with all earnestness, not obligation.

Renewing Your Vows

Marriages and creators who have stood the test of time have done so because of their commitment to renewal. Of course anything can get boring and difficult when you have too much of it. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing, after all. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have that good thing forever and always and still be able to appreciate it further down the line. It takes a renewal of perspective and the courage to grow in order to maintain it.

So with whatever project you’re working on right now, if it has you down in the dumps, try and revive your love for it by reminding you of what got you interested in the first place. If it no longer resonates with you, try and think hard about what new meaning you can add to it in your life and how this renewed version of it can push you forward. Or if you haven’t even started on a project in fear of reality slapping you in the face, you now at least know to expect that phase to disrupt your initial joy with it.

But don’t fret because like a good marriage, projects will have their ups and downs. Your true character and your commitment to your craft will often be tested to see how badly you want to express whatever your current project is meant to express. Whether it’s what you truly feel or you’re discovering what you truly feel through it, you will never know unless you see it through to the end.

And if you can do that, maybe you will get to experience a happily ever after.

The Top 4 R’s Creators Need to Know Retiring

MarlonLeave a comment

As outlined in a previous post, every creative project has its cycle that kind of resembles a marriage. There’s a honeymoon phase where everything is fresh, fun, and exciting. Then when things start to settle down happily ever after is only possible through commitment. Yet, despite the commitment creators put into their work, sometimes we reach a point where we might have to divorce ourselves from a project before it can be completed.

We all hope that we get to see our creative projects to the very end. For every completed work of art out there—published novels, movies with theatrical releases, music that the whole world can listen to etc.—there are probably thousands of other works that go left unfinished each day. This could be due to a number of factors like budget constraints, creators being swallowed by resistance, or in some unfortunate cases, death.

Because tomorrow is not a guarantee for any of us, we must try to do as much as humanly possible, each day, to see our vision come to life. Whether we get to the end of the project or not, it’s important to give it our all each day so that God forbid it’s our last, we would have had a lot to show for it rather than dying with the regret over how much we procrastinated. This may sound a little too morbid, and edging on the toxic productivity side, but I assure there are many ways around burning out from keeping this in mind, while also being able to create as boldly as we can each day.

Today we will cover The Top 3 R’s Creators Need to Know Before Retiring:

  1. Resilience
  2. Reward
  3. Reflection
  4. Recovery

Resilience

We often talk about the resistance that comes with creativity here on Your Write to Live. The resistance that our ego feeds us by filling our heads with doubt, perfectionism, and maybe some full on self loathing, which will all prevent us from sitting down and doing the work that is important to us. The positive antithesis to this resistance is resilience, which is your ability to withstand boredom, frustration, and distractions.

When a creative project starts to wear you down making you feel bored and/or frustrated, you need to develop the resilience to push through that resistance. If you are under the obligation to complete a project for a paying client and you have hard deadlines to meet, this is just an unfortunate blow to your energy levels that you need to take to see it to the end. But if you’re a hobby creator, there’s a bit more leeway to pace yourself and reduce the amount of work you do each day, but in no way should you quit when revelations in your work just might be on the other side of resilience.

When we begin to feel bored and/or frustrated by our creative projects, it is also easy to get distracted by unimportant things and end up using them as excuses for our early retirement for the day. Or maybe even for life if we let it get that bad. That means reducing your use of social media, not playing as many video games as you usually do, and most importantly resisting the urge to reward yourself too prematurely.

Reward


While it is important to resist the urge to reward yourself too prematurely, it is still important that you do reward yourself for your efforts. This can look like many different things based on your preferences, but personally for me, after a hard day of work I like to reward myself by playing video games or watching a movie. If I’ve engaged my brain enough in cognitively active work, it’s nice to finally sit back and engage it more passively with entertainment.

I’ve said before that the real reason why we can’t relax and enjoy things unless we’ve done difficult things is because of brain activity more than it has anything to do with our moral standing. To recap, it’s not about chastising yourself for not being productive, and that you don’t deserve to reward yourself if you haven’t been creating, rather it’s about having turned your brain on enough and emptied it out of its potential content before soaking in someone else’s artwork that makes entertainment more enjoyable.

Furthermore, as good as these post-work-session rewards may be, you must also remember to perceive your work as the ultimate reward to yourself. To your soul. You’re expressing something from every fiber of your being whenever you decide to engage your creativity, and that’s serious business, so give it the respect that it deserves by giving it your full attention.

Reflection

After you’ve created as much as you could for the day and rewarded yourself accordingly, then it’s time to reflect on the day. Think about all the hardship you may have faced during your creative hours and assess yourself as honestly as possible. Were there moments where you were just phoning it in because resistance was creeping up? Was the reward proportionate to the amount of the work you did or was it too excessive? And was the reward in any way valuable and appropriate to your purpose?

Ask yourself these questions and more so that for the next day, you know how to do better. Every day we create something, we learn a little bit more about ourselves. Sometimes it’s about how we handle the process itself in regards to how patient we might be with ourselves when faced with difficulty. Or sometimes our own work that’s meant to touch the souls of others ends up touching our own and opening our eyes to something about ourselves in ways that were not possible had we not took on the project in the first place.

If you’ve been around Your Write to Live for a while you know this, but if you’re new here I must state that that’s what we’re all about here: growth through daily milestones. So long as your growing in any amount of increments you’re capable of, small and large alike, that’s all that matters. So reflect on how you can grow from today’s work and allow these lessons to carry you for the next day and beyond.

Recovery

After everything is said and done then it’s time for some rest and recovery. I know I sounded morbid earlier saying how we don’t have much time on this Earth, so you better create as much as you can each day or it’s a waste, but rest and recovery is just as important as the consistent creativity we aim to strive for when it’s feasible and possible. You just have to be honest and realistic about where you’re at physically, mentally, and chronologically in terms of other life responsibilities.

It’s all about meeting a healthy balance between hard work and rest, never straying too excessively on one side for the sake of the other. Even if you’re under a strict deadline, it’s never worth your physical health to get something done, or you will literally put the dead in deadline. Likewise, if you’re always in rest and recovery mode when you’re more than perfectly capable to get back to work, you might die a little on the inside at the level of your soul. You’re a creator. You’re meant to create. Not doing so leaves with you a lot of unexpressed emotion and potential.

Take as much time as you need and no more and no less. For instance, as of writing this blog post, I have gone six straight weeks consistently writing in my journal, writing for this blog, and working on my passion project every single week day almost without fail. I may have missed one of these things on some days, but for the most part I’ve remained consistent. I can feel myself feeling tired from all the effort I put into stifling my resistance, so I know that next week or two weeks from now, it would be wise to either slow it down considerably or take a week long break to recharge.

As should you if you’ve done all you could to stifle your own resistance.

P-ing Over Productivity

MarlonLeave a comment

We live in a society where our worth is tied heavily to our sense of productivity. If you’re not doing enough, then you are not enough, by definition. You can feel this any time you run into someone you haven’t seen in a while. Almost everybody’s go to question is work related. Such versions of these questions include:

“Where do you work now?”

“How’s that job of yours, you still there?”

“Are you working?”

It’s as if we’ve become human doings as opposed to human beings. We forgot what it was like to just be a human without needing our jobs to define our character. It’s funny too because the word work carried a double meaning. On the surface it pertains to working at a job. But then if you dig a little deeper, it also carries the implicit question of are you functioning?

Today we’re going to delve into The Six P’s of Productivity so that we are no longer squashed by the expectation to be and appear productive in the eyes of our peers, and learn how to approach life in a more meaningful way that is less dependent on how you look to the world, and more focused on how you feel about your personal experience.

  1. Presence
  2. Practice
  3. Progress
  4. Pacing
  5. Purpose
  6. Patience

PRESENCE

What I love about writing is that it forces me to focus on one thought at a time. My ADHD brain usually races from one to another in a seemingly nonrelated manner. What writing affords me is the ability to slow down my thought process and to get a visual sense of how my thoughts are either connected or disjointed.

Within the process of writing, I try my best to not think about anything else but the topic at hand whether it’s my personal journal, my novel, or this very blog post right here. As soon as I let my mind distract me and tempt me toward doing something else, then I will lose that chance to express my feelings and ideas in a coherent manner. Either I will give up on writing or end up writing something incoherent and all over the place.

This is why it’s importance to eliminate distractions as best as possible and train your mind to think only about the task at hand. Any thoughts that are irrelevant to what you’re doing, you can make a quick mental note to take action on later, but if you’ve sat down and decided to write, paint, or compose a piece of music, then that is all you should physically be doing and that is all you should be thinking about.

And all that takes…

PRACTICE

Practice makes perfect, they say, but what they don’t say is how perfectionism prevents practice. What often prevents us from getting things done is a feeling of incompetence and the lack of confidence which I’ve touched upon in 3 Ways Perfection is the Ultimate Procrastination, and the only way to gain any sense of competence is practice.

Of course you’re gonna suck at something at the beginning. As I always say, much thanks to a quote from a Street Fighter graphic novel ala, “a master was once an awkward novice.” You need to get over yourself and realize that it’s not about how you appear to others or even yourself in your mind, rather it’s about mastering a craft and doing what it takes to become a said master.

And all that takes practice. Consistent, messy, and grueling practice. Read the books and watch the videos you need to learn about music composition all you want, and you can even daydream about being a famous musician all you want. But none of that will really amount to anything if you don’t practice your instrument and just play the damn thing to eventually achieve some sense of…

PROGRESS

Being present when you practice anything, you are bound to achieve some level of progress. No matter how little your progress is, it is important to take stock of it, especially if you’re feeling stuck. One way to do this is to write in a Progress Journal and keep track of all the things you get better at in your given field.

This idea of a Progress Journal is so important that I wrote about it a second time many years since the initial post, but ADHD interconnectivity of my blog aside, even mentioning how much I wrote about progress so many times speaks on the importance of it because from each successive post about progress marks different milestones in my own personal journey.

In your own personal journey, progress is going to be something very close and intimate to you in a way that no one else will ever truly understand, unless you have a good mentor keeping track of your progress along with you from an objective and an emotionally detached point of view. You kind of need both your personal connection to your progress and your mentor’s detached point of view to it in order to strike a balance toward proper…

PACING

Whenever you start a new job or hobby, it is important to also pace yourself so you don’t burn out. As an ADHDer, I’ve had so many hyper-focuses that almost everything I love doing creates a tinge of fear in me because I remember all the times I would sacrifice eating, sleeping, and even relationships just so I can continue enjoying the dopamine rush of doing something new and exciting.

So while you do want to become present in what you do, practice it consistently, and track your progress, you also want to pace yourself so you don’t burn out as fast as I have many times. For instance, when I wrote the first draft of It Starts at Home, back when it was called Dear Stupid Diary, I wrote about 6000 words a day because I couldn’t stop myself. I got addicted to finally becoming present to the point that my entire sense of time had gone irrelevant.

It’s very seductive when we find something we really love to do that it can easily consume all of our time and energy to the point of costing other aspects of our lives. So don’t forget to take your appropriate breaks and to pace yourself accordingly so that you save your energy and excitement for another day and sustain that consistency over a longer period of time. It is much better to do a little each day for a long period of time than it is to everything all at once in one day, only to risk losing all that initial euphoria and end up doing nothing the next.

Pacing becomes really easy when you’ve discovered your…

PURPOSE

Why you do what you do is a deeply intimate thing only you and a handful people will ever truly understand. Whenever I feel stuck on any creative project, I always ask myself, “why am I even doing this again?” If it’s because I want to appear productive and impress people, or even prove to myself that I’m not as lazy as my ADHD forces me to be sometimes, then I’ve already lost.

However, when I remember that it’s because I love creating things and enjoy the presence it affords me, then I am better equipped to keep at that task at hand. This blog post itself has been a challenge because the first draft was all about my work experience, which is ironic because of how I opened this post about not tying our self worth and identities to what we do for work.

But upon this rewrite, I’ve regained a sense of my purpose for writing Your Write to Live blog posts: to share my own personal experiences in a way that helps others overcome their own sense of dread and resistance toward living their best possible lives. Essentially, much like Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, these blog posts are reminders to myself on how to think and act better in my life. But unlike Marcus, I’m intentionally sharing my thoughts with you in the hopes that they can also provide relief and assistance to anyone else beyond myself.

But whether I help anyone or not, or even start to follow my own advice, we all need a little…

PATIENCE

It’s easy to get impatient when we can see who we can be if we just tried hard enough. A lot of people’s negative emotion is due to not fulfilling their potential that they often see looming in the distance. It becomes a bit of a judge and executioner of our current selves because we’re not who we could be. And while it is helpful to know that you can be better than you are now, thus driving yourself toward personal development, it is also important to be patient with yourself.

Sometimes we’ll stumble and fall along the way, and that’s all part of life. Maybe you can’t be present enough to practice consistently. Maybe you still feel like you haven’t made progress no matter how much you try to take stock of your progress. Maybe you pace yourself poorly and lose sight of your purpose.

When all these things fail, always remember to be patient with yourself. There’s only so much progress one can make at a given time. We all wish we had all the time in the world to do all the things we want and achieve what we want, but life often gets in the way with emergencies, social obligations, and random illnesses and other setbacks that prevent us from moving forward.

Be patient with yourself and with life having trust and faith that whatever holds you back is only temporary. Nothing in life is permanent, only short term or long term. So be patient for the storm to roll by and maybe you’ll find yourself in a place of calm once again, ready to excel at what you love once more.

3 Ways Perfectionism is the Ultimate Procrastination

Marlon4 Comments

I’ve come across several people in my life who have stopped themselves from finishing a project, or even getting started in the first place, because they believed in some perfectionist ideal on how the process should be—instead of simply letting the process be what it is.

The process of creativity is often a long, messy, and emotionally enduring endeavour. It is almost never a straightforward process, rather a bumpy road with lots of twists and turns. Although the inherent challenges that come with creativity can make you anxious about the road ahead, it is actually within this struggle where our greatest work resides.

Resistance is a natural part of the process, and often times, the more resistance you have toward something, the more important it actually is. Resistance is your ego’s way of trying to preserve itself by bringing your self-esteem down, and it is your duty as a creator to squash your ego in its wake and get to work anyway.

As a life long procrastinator, I am no stranger to this process, and am still a victim to it when I’m not mentally prepared enough for it, but nonetheless I hope you find what I share today to be helpful in your own journey.

So without further adieu, here are the 3 Ways Perfectionism is the Ultimate Procrastination:

  1. Not feeling competent enough.
  2. Not feeling original enough.
  3. Not feeling motivated enough.

Practice Makes Progress

If you don’t feel confident to get started on a project, it might mean that you’re lacking a few fundamental skills of the trade to even put a dent into that said project. But do not fret because there is a lot of joy and meaning to be found in learning and practicing new skills. As you learn new things, you will naturally feel excited to employ these new skills and techniques to whatever you’re working on.

I know in my experience, whenever I’ve learned a new guitar or piano chord, a writing concept, or a new music production technique, I’ve always felt the need to experiment with that new skill in my latest project in any given field. It didn’t matter whether I employed the new skill in small doses, in excess, or scrapped it from the final project entirely. What mattered was that I gave myself the freedom to experiment with something new and broaden my skillset.

A lot of people feel like they’re not good enough to start on anything because of this lack of self confidence. And since we often equate competence with confidence, that lack of competence holds us back. I’ve heard the same excuse a thousand times by now:

“I can’t write a song/write a book/make a painting, I’m not creative enough.”

It’s like saying, “I can’t do yoga, I’m not flexible enough.”

Well, here’s the kicker: you become flexible by doing yoga. Likewise with anything creative, you stretch out your creativity at a certain artform the more you engage it. Who cares if you don’t know how song or plot structures work or how to mix colours properly?

You learn by experimenting and actively choosing things to learn either through a class on or offline, a teacher or mentor, and/or by observing the works of art that inspire you and comparing your work to theirs in a reasonable and non-self-esteem-crushing kind of way. The only important thing to note is that you don’t keep yourself stuck in training mode because you’re too afraid to actually create something. Study your techniques all you want, but actually put them to use at some point or that can become another side of this same coin of lacking competence.

Nothing and Everything is Original

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again; do not be overly concerned with being original. It’s a huge waste of time and energy, and a surefire way of crushing your own morale. This is another thing a lot of potential creators often contend with. They want to be above the crowd by way of originality because they have it in their heads that they must be this wonderfully unique snowflake, or there is no point of creating anything because they’ll just be making more of the same to put into the stratosphere.

Stop this kind of thinking NOW!

Think about this instead:

There are only 7 plots in fiction.

There are only 7 notes in a scale.

There are only 7 colours in a rainbow.

Nothing you create will ever be entirely original because you’re already using established artforms such as fiction, music, or art. Just because there are only seven plots in fiction, doesn’t mean you can’t write the story your way. Just because there are only seven notes in a scale, doesn’t mean you can’t rearrange those notes your way. Just because there are only 7 colours in a rainbow, doesn’t mean you can’t mix and match those colours your way.

Most of us want to think outside of the box, but we need to know what’s in that box in order to know what we’re straying away from in the first place, and to do so with moderation that serves our work. Otherwise it can come across as, or actually become, trying too hard to stand out instead of genuinely trying to expressing ourselves.

Maybe your novel can have a mix of more than just one of those 7 plots in fiction. Maybe your song can include a chromatic note or two that isn’t in the 7 notes of its original scale. Maybe your painting can blend those 7 colours in a varying degrees to achieve different hues of colours you didn’t think possible. But the most important thing is to use these lucky 7 things to your advantage, rather than something you actively work against.

Originality, then, isn’t about coming up with something entirely new, rather taking pre-existing matter and mixing and matching different elements into something new by design of how you’ve personally conveyed it. If your goal is to be original, you risk trying too hard to be eccentric and esoteric to the point of drawing too much attention to how weird and different your artwork is instead of actually having something useful to say with it.

“Originality comes from genuine self expression, not concerted effort.” – Marlon from Your Write to Live

Motivation is Random, Discipline is Free Will Power

As someone with ADHD, I have often fallen under the seductive spell of hyper-focus whenever I’ve come up with a new idea or discovered a new hobby. I go at it full force, basking in its novelty with absolute certainty that I will do this forever, until I stop dead in my tracks because I’ve burnt myself out from going too hard at something instead of pacing myself accordingly.

Then I spend weeks, sometimes months, wondering if I’ll ever have the motivation to start writing another song or editing a new video, writing a novel etc.

A lot of people say that they will only create something when they feel motivated and will not force themselves to do it otherwise, and for people who have created some great volumes of work that have only come from allowing their muse to motivate them by her own accord, that’s all well and good.

But for those who haven’t even completed or started a project, this kind of thinking is detrimental to creativity and can often be an excuse for never creating to begin with.

It pains me to talk with people who contend with all of these ways in which procrastination manifests as perfectionism, but when it comes to motivation I probably relate to it the most because it’s the one and only demon on this list that I’ve yet to conquer. But basically you really don’t want to be waiting around for those times you feel motivated enough to create because you’ll either be waiting for a long time—which will then result in small bursts of creativity for a short amount of time before you spend another several weeks, months, maybe even years wondering if it’ll ever happen again—or you’ll be waiting forever.

The decision to create needs to come from you and you alone.

You cannot rely on random happenstance to get you there. If you start feeling bad for not having worked on your creativity for a long time, that anxiety around it is actually unspent energy that could easily be going into your project as opposed to crushing your own self-esteem with the self imposed guilt trip. What you want to do is create healthy habits that prime you to start working, even on your most resistant days, all to the point of turning your routine into a ritual.

You want to get to the point where you can’t not create something on most, if not all days. It’s something you need to get done or the day does not feel complete otherwise. Even if you don’t turn out your best work for several days straight, at least you’ve gotten the crappy ideas out of the way so that when you get back into the swing of things, you’re at least glad that you’ve committed to your practice. That is how you know you’ve turned a habit into a ritual.

While there is the danger of turning your ritual into a superstition where you think, “I gotta have my large coffee and cookie every morning or I can’t create anything!” Having some kind of routine in place to at least increase your chances of getting something is better than having low to no chance in hell that you create anything at all.

We’ll get into overwork and burnout in a future post, but for now, let’s simmer in the idea that maybe we aren’t working enough to ensure we get our creative needs met. And I don’t know about you, but I get pretty depressed if I’m not creating at least one or two things on nearly daily basis, and I’m starting to realize just how much of that depression is a lot of emotionality that is being left unexpressed that can be transmuted into writing fiction, producing music, or even the simple act of journaling.

It’s actually through journaling before almost every writing session where I tackle my demons and empty out my mind to make space for creative ideas. I need to check in with myself and see how I’m feeling about my life and the work laid out ahead of me, otherwise these unchecked doubts will creep up in any given writing session. Only then I’ll feel like I’m strong and smart enough to get on with the project.

Feeling and Being Enough

That’s what this entire post comes down to in a nutshell: feeling enough.

Creative people are notorious for not feeling or being enough and that’s why a lot of us over or under perform where we can be finding a happy and healthy medium between the two. Just notice that whenever you encounter any self doubt, imposter syndrome, or resistance, it’s all pent up energy that is being left unexpressed, and you need an outlet for it.

Personally for me, creating a slew of work doesn’t mean I will guarantee a sense of meaning and contentedness in my life, but it sure as hell increases the probability for them, provided that I am coming at it from a place of stillness. A place where I’m not using my creativity to avoid uncomfortable thoughts and feelings about my life, rather taking them head on with confidence that I will get through it all no matter how difficult it all is.

It’s a tough balancing act.

You want to create because you have something in you to express, and you have to fight your ego every step of the way as to not do it for the wrong reasons like fame, fortune, or fear. Like the fear of not feeling or being enough. Feeling and being enough starts with you right here, right now in making the decision to take your creativity into your own hands, not the whims of fate. And definitely in not submitting to the whims of our egos that hold us back in making us believe we are not good or original enough. That’s not what’s important.

What’s important is giving ourselves the permission to express ourselves as that is Your Write to Live.

Therapeutic Journaling Part 10: The Gratitude Journal

MarlonLeave a comment

One of the most overlooked, but also one of the most powerful kinds of journals you can write, is the Gratitude Journal. All too often we’ll journal out our problems and hopes for the future that we forget to take stock of what we currently have: The Present Moment.

It’s all we ever have and no matter how much loss we’ve suffered in the past and how much more we’ve got to gain in the future, so long as we’re simply breathing, we have a lot to be thankful for. Maybe you’re not where you want to be in life and maybe you’re suffering a crisis. The mere fact that you get to live and be given the opportunity to learn and grow from hardship should be appreciated.

It’s a strange concept, to be thankful for even hardship. But if you really think about it, without sadness and hardship, we would not have much appreciation for happiness and the good times in our lives. There’d be no contrast. And in the business of contrasting, instead of journaling out your problems all the time, take a moment to be grateful and acknowledge where you’re at.

“He who cannot be contented with what he has will not be contented with what he wants.” – Socrates

It was true over 2000 years ago and it’s still true to this day. Practicing gratitude can help reframe your mind toward abundance rather than always focusing on scarcity. We have evolved to focus on scarcity because human survival was much harder before than it is now, so we’ve still got a lot of leftover monkey brain residing within us. Not to say it’s entirely useless because starvation and poverty are real problems, but I think it’s safe to say that if you can afford the internet connection in order to read this post, there’s a high chance that you’re living a comfortable life, if not a luxurious one.

Yet that’s the problem, right?

Comfortability.

We work so hard to get to the point of comfortability because being challenged is difficult, we just wanna laze around and watch Netflix or play video games all day because they’re the most fun and easiest things to do. But then we tend to grow stagnant when we live a little too comfortably. So just as we need challenges to help us grow, we also need ample rest so we have the energy to tackle the challenges of life.

It’s a balancing act that we will never perfect, but will definitely try our entire lives to employ. You want to be journaling your problems out for the catharsis and possible problem solving that can come with it. And you also want to be writing about the things you’ve achieved thus far and be grateful for what you have in life, even if it may seem very little.

Harkening back to the Socrates quote, sometimes we get so busy chasing things that we think will make us happy that we somehow forget how to just be happy. We think that next relationship, that new job, or that new toy is what’s gonna make us happy, and maybe we get one or all of those things and then it’s like “so what now?”

That’s the tricky thing with life.

It’s good to have goals to strive for so that each day you live is filled with some sense of purpose and direction. But as that old cliché goes, “life is a journey, not a destination.” It’s cliché because it’s true. If you’re not moving toward an aim you are then aimless and begin to feel the weight of existential dread falling upon you.

So you work, work, and work, and you finally achieve your goal, and then you’re confronted with a whole new problem: “what’s next?”

Achieving one goal only opens you up to having a whole new set of problems you did not think possible, and since you have much more life left to live, then the process repeats. Until the very end of your days there’s always gonna be one more mountain to climb because it’s just what we do as human beings. We inherently do not feel like we are or have enough and so we strive to fill ourselves with more and more experiences and possessions—all of which are not bad things in and of themselves, but none of them really mean anything unless we take the time to be grateful for them.

If you have nothing pertinent to journal about, no issues to solve, then take a moment to write a Gratitude Journal because we could all use a little respite here and there. Give thanks to the people you love, the art that you’ve consumed, and even thank yourself for showing up for your daily practice. Life is very short and we tend to go from one thing to the next in a heartbeat, so giving ourselves a moment to breathe and feel that heartbeat, even for just a fraction of eternity, we are reminded that it is Your Write to Live.