Cycles of Creative Rest

Creativity is cyclical, like the seasons.

We cannot produce all the time. We must make time to rest.

But in a culture that prizes productivity and output above all else, how do we allow for the time and space? 

Thinking of rest as part of the cycle of creation allows me to indulge fully, to trust that I am resourcing and gathering ideas and fresh energy for the next bout of creative expression.

It allows me to honor my own internal rhythms, whether or not (most often not!) they conform to the rhythms of society, of the calendar year, or of my own expectations. 

Come check out the Hot Mess series on TikTok, and watch as I lose my mind - and find it again - writing, producing, and acting in a show!

#CreatingIsHealing🦋

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hi, my friends. Welcome back. Um, <laugh>, I'm laughing at myself because today's topic shouldn't be scary, and yet it feels scary to talk about. We're talking about rest, so you should have no reason to be afraid of it. But I was just thinking about why it feels , um, anxiety producing to bring this up. And I think that's exactly why it's a great topic for this because as a country in the west, we have one of, like, as a culture, we are very proud of our workaholic attitudes. We're very proud of our output. We are very proud of our ability to hustle. Um, some less so post covid. There's been a real rethinking of what is the point of working so much and so hard and all the time. Um, but compared to, you know, a lot of European nations where they have six weeks of guaranteed vacation and they take siestas in the afternoon, and there's just this culture of play and this culture of rest, that's an attitude that's built into the culture. And we have a different culture. And I find rest for me. I, I also am high energy and I like producing stuff, so I don't always rest very well. Um, and in fact, when I'm resting, I'm always worried I'm not doing enough. And so the reason I was bringing this up is because I went to a film festival in June and I was up staying with my aunt the month before in May. And I didn't wanna do anything creatively. I felt like I should be doing all these things 'cause I knew I was gonna be at a film festival in June and I was so excited about it. And I was so proud of the film we were bringing and screening. And I, I just had all this internal dialogue of, you know, I'm about to kind of launch this next project into the world. There's so much I wanna be doing, and I wanted to do nothing. I'd actually picked up a novel for the first time in, I don't know how long. And all I wanted to do at night was curl up on the couch and read, which as a kid, was my greatest joy. And I've really lost that since college. And especially during Covid , I found I had no attention span. I read the New York Times and The New Yorker, pretty much. I don't read the New York Times cover to cover. I skimm the headlines and then go down to the arts and the recipe section and read those. Um, but I read The New Yorker so, so much. And I love long form articles, but a novel, it's a very different thing. And really curling up with a novel is a very different energy. It's very meditative, it's very quiet, it's very internal. And I was talking to a coach about this because I felt, I felt like there should be a to-do list and I couldn't figure out what the to-do list was. And she said something that I thought was quite brilliant, which was that there are cycles to everything. And that maybe this was my cycle of creative rest. And it, it struck me that like, just naming it gave me so much permission to soak up that time and knowing that the film festival was gonna be five days of extrovert energy, of meeting people, of seeing films, of connecting, of hearing people's stories, parties. It was just gonna be a lot of energy and kind of not, not performative energy, but, you know, being on a lot. And my body was like gearing up for that, knowing that that would be really intense and just wanted to , um, cocoon itself. And also was coming off of other stuff that I had been really pushing and being creative about. And I just wanted a break. And it was so helpful to give it a name and to decide like that, that month I was just gonna do nothing but read a book. I wasn't , I don't think I put the podcast out that month too, which was one of the big things I felt like, oh, I should, you know, do this. And I was like, I, my brain just doesn't even function right now. And, and the reason I'm bringing it here is because, you know, <laugh> , I love a plan. I just mapped out an entire six months of the rest of the year from July to December. 'cause I'm trying to figure out a bunch of stuff for my finance day job. And I like knowing where things are headed. And I like setting goals and achieving goals. And I like having , um, deadlines to do things. You know, there's, there's a real sense of , um, if I don't sort of challenge myself to put out a podcast every two weeks, then I just won't do it. And so there's this really interesting fine line, especially with creative stuff, because it's so vulnerable, because it's so scary to be visible and vulnerable, where I think we all have to be very , um, honest with ourselves about asking is this, is this me resisting the work? Or is this me resourcing myself? And what's fascinating is it could be either like, Netflix sometimes is incredibly resourcing. I've got nothing left and I just really wanna watch a really good show, or even a really terrible show. This can be really fun. And sometimes Netflix is a reason to not do the thing that feels too hard and scary to do. So that's another thing that's so tricky about rest, is it's easy to say we're resting and not be resting. Um, and so this is very much an inquiry that I think we all need to have, but just even knowing that rest is such an important part of you , uh, restore yourself. And it's interesting because , um, back to the Netflix example, I've always felt that rest should be, you know, massages or things away from the electronics. And Instagram is definitely not restful. And I have this coach that I really, really admire and she gets up at five crushes her entire day, goes to the gym, boss is like a boss. And that I think five o'clock she's done. And she will watch Netflix for three hours from five o'clock to eight o'clock, whatever TV show she's

Speaker 2: 5:56

Excited about, has no qualms about it. Her and her husband just like veg in front of the Netflix. And she is thrilled. And she's one of these people who's built a multimillion dollar empire of coaching. Um, she's brilliant. She's funny. And that is her go-to when she finds it incredibly restful and she can check out and she can take a break. And she gives herself permission to really enjoy that. And so for me, I've been making note of that. Like, sometimes I call it just reading the internet. Like all I wanna do is curl up and read the New Yorker and Vanity Fair articles and then check , uh, you know, what do I check? Also Vogue or something like that. Or the New York Times recipes. I've gotten into reading recipes, which I find really fascinating. I was never a cook. So , um, but just reading things, you know, and I, I feel like reading the internet is just kind of, it's endless, but it, it's, I used to feel bad about it, right? Like, oh, am I just wasting time? Am I avoiding something? And now I find that sometimes I'm more able to say to myself, no, I really just like, I wanna cocoon. I wanna curl up and just read the internet. I wanna read other people's stories. I wanna hear about how the world is going. And the reason I like long form articles like Vanity Fair and New Yorker is it helps explain and digest for me what is going on in the world. So I wanna hear someone else's perspective on the Supreme Court case or you know , uh, whether there's gonna be indictment, an indictment coming, or what are the chances of saving our democracy? I like knowing these things. Um, and, and so giving myself permission to do that and then checking in every once in a while. Am I being lazy? Am I being, to me, laziness is not a thing. It's really just resistance. Is there something that I wanna be doing and I'm afraid to do and so I'm not doing it and instead I'm doing this. And sometimes it's just, no, I'm done. My brain has got nothing left. I've got nothing left. And I think what's interesting about Cycles of Rest is that again, we live in a highly structured time that, you know, especially if you're at all in hustle culture, there's quarterly goals and mid-year check-ins. And I'm always trying to give myself things to get done by the end of the month. And I use a calendar as a way to set myself up for things. You know, it can be a North Star. And yet I find <laugh> , my calendar plans almost never work out that way. A lot of it has to do with kind of being chronically ill because I set a plan and then I have no energy for three weeks. And I'm like, oh , there goes that plan. Not gonna get into that today 'cause it's a really tough , uh, thing to go through. But it's taught me a lot about , um, sort of letting the internal, the internal rhythms lead me to new places I didn't expect. And what I end up doing when I really don't have any energy to do something creative , um, or physical, is I do a , a lot of journaling and I do a lot of thought work on how I value myself as an artist. How, what are the things that I wanna be doing in the world that I am resisting, and how can I dig into those thoughts that make those things seem scary or hard or wrong or me not good enough? And I just do a lot, a lot of work. Um, there's an entire wall of Post-its, I'll be posting on Instagram because I'm obsessed with journaling on Post-Its right now because I feel like they're very , uh, finite and then they're done. And because journaling is so internal, I never feel like there's anything to show for it. So I started putting them on the wall so I can look up and look back at the week and I might not have produced a podcast or I might not have written the script, or I might not have auditioned, but I've done all this internal work and, and I think there is something, even if you're not a journaler, even if you're not someone who is actively trying to examine their thoughts , um, which is totally fine. I think we all have our journey in different ways, but there's still something about being on a break, about just hanging out. I had a friend who , um, <laugh> , he liked to go fishing and I asked him why. And he said, it's really just a reason to sit by the water and drink a beer. And I was like, huh, yeah, that makes sense, right? It's like you just need a thing that gets you out there , um, that you can stare at the water and let your thoughts sort of , uh, not ruminate, but uh , marinate, right? Let your thoughts really sort themselves out. Like I find hanging out with myself to be a really delightful thing. And sometimes even when I put down, just lie down and do nothing, or listen to music and do nothing, really giving myself permission that those are deeply resourcing things for me to just hang out and nothing to do. And so again, it's about seeing what is resourcing and what is possibly the thing that is happening in the background on the back burner that isn't an active push, that you're trying to get something done, but you're having this real internal shift about what's next. I think part of my work leading up to the film festival was feeling this readiness for the next level of my career for really connecting with filmmakers that I didn't know and, and really stepping into bigger projects and feeling already just the thought of it. This incredible resistance and panic hadn't even happened yet. And I could already feel myself shrinking and protecting myself and trying to armor up and trying to bail on the film festival. And so a lot of May was me that month of May was me spending time doing the work of, for me it's journaling. It's just what helps , um, really looking at what are my thoughts about the, the next level of the career that I want. What are my thoughts about shooting, you know, an indie , uh, feature film project? What are my thoughts about stepping into a lead role? And they're not great thoughts to be honest. They're all like, you know, all of this like not enoughness and not ready and um, uh, like, who would want me, you know, I'm not gonna get into it. But I think we all have that, right? We all have that in different places. And for me it was incredibly helpful to spend time seeing those, listing them out every day and seeing, oh, this is just the repetitive thought I had this thought yesterday, I'll probably have it tomorrow. And it, it allowed me to slowly create some wiggle room between that thought feeling incredibly true and that thought being, being more of a witness to my own thoughts, being more of, I have a friend who says a ticker tape parade, right? That goes across your brain and you don't have to listen to it, you can just let it go across your brain and just be like, oh, there's a thought happening. So spending time with the places in which I could feel my body tense up and knowing that the places where I have tension where I don't feel ready to step into something new are the places where I block myself from the next thing. It's a little woo , but I think it works for everyone in different ways. You might not feel it in your system, energetic system in the same way, but we all have things that we don't feel ready for. And so when opportunities come, we're gonna either 'em up or bail on 'em because we're , we can only do what we feel ready for. Um, so I spent that time and it felt like I was doing nothing. But when I showed up to that film festival, I felt like my best self. I felt so at ease meeting people. And I'm usually someone who goes to a film festival and I like panic because I get so in my head thinking everyone else knows what they're doing and I have no idea. And what am I doing here? When am I here to sell? And who am I as an artist? Like, I just get so in my head and this time I just like hung out and let myself be excited about. I had one whole conversation about, we were standing in the back of , uh, this huge , um, panel discussion, which was really, really fascinating. But it was the first morning and it had just gone on for a really long time and I was really craving stretching and I'm standing in the back and I made this new friend who also was dying to stretch and we sort of made it this game to try to very subtly make yoga pose stretches happen. Like she was like, I'm gonna drop a spoon. It was a breakfast. I'm gonna drop a sto spoon on the floor so I can down do a downward facing dog picking it up. This might not be your kind of joke. I thought it was freaking hilarious. And it wasn't about acting and it wasn't about art. It was just about hanging out and having things that matter to me and being in this space and letting myself be me and really connecting with people about that. And I, for the first time I walked away from a film festival feeling like I'd made actual friends that I want to text and hang out with and know and spend five weeks on a set with rather than just handing out my business card to everyone and you know, writing an email later saying like, I've done all those things, you know, kind of the follow up and it works for some people. It's never worked for me. I've always just felt like I don't know who you are and I don't feel myself 'cause I feel like I'm trying to pretend to be somebody else, right? So all of this work that I did leading up to the film festival was about knowing myself

Speaker 3: 14:50

And knowing, knowing what I had to offer. And so it made me much less , uh, pushy. I had, I had nothing to prove I was just there. And that to me just felt so delightful to hang out and really get to see people and also not feel like I had to meet everybody every, like, for the whole festival and not go to every party, but just go to whoever I was drawn to and have conversations. Like I'm an incredibly chatty person. I like talking to just about anybody except if I'm at a film festival where it feels like I'm supposed to, and then I shut down, write the paradox of that and or I can do the thing where I just go out again and hand my business card and talk to everybody. But I never feel like I really connected 'cause I was just doing the networking thing. And networking in that vein doesn't work for me. And so I spend all this time really thinking about, well, how do I show up? What is my energy? How do I track opportunities? How did this last film get made? It's 'cause Oh, I was hanging out with my friend talking about leaving Brooklyn and he turned to me and said, let's make a movie. And I, I wasn't auditioning, I wasn't looking for it. I wasn't even talking to him about filmmaking . We just ended up making this thing. And so again, looking back to how do I show up my best self where I then want to do the kinds of projects that I attract is some of the internal work. And it might not feel like work. Um, and that's maybe the beauty of it. So, oh, I had one more thing I was gonna say about creative rest. Um, oh yes, timelines. So the last thing I'll say, which I think is really, really , uh, for me something I'm still struggling with is that they're hard to plan. And I feel all the time, like I'm supposed to rest on a Saturday, I'm supposed to rest on a Sunday, and Saturdays are usually the days that I really wanna design something on Canva. And I'm like making a website or a postcard or a who knows what. And I really like working on scripts on like Friday nights and I'm really bad at going out on the nights where I feel like I'm supposed to go out. Like Friday night is supposed to be a big date night or Saturday night, I don't even know. Or a big party night. And I find those way too stressful and overwhelming and I'd much rather go out on a Tuesday or a Thursday where it's way less packed , um, and way less intense and just have more casualness. Like, I don't like the pressure of feeling like everyone is out to meet somebody and I'm like, I just wanna be in the world. And that's me. And I've always felt incredibly weird about it. I feel weird about it talking now. And so I've always felt like I was off schedule from everyone else's. Like I was supposed to get my work done during the week so I could go out on the weekends, but that's never been my cycle. I tend to , um, work in spurts. I tend to like think about something and feel like I'm not getting anything done and then get really excited and in one day like crank out a script or you know, crank out a rehearsal or whatever it is or, or work for stretches on a song. I'm not. Um, and it's interesting 'cause I'm always trying to create more structure because again, I don't wanna be resisting the work, so I wanna make sure I'm showing up every day for the work. And sometimes the downside of having these cycles is that it gets easy to stay in a fallow period that's no longer fallow. It's just resistance. So again, this question of inquiry and knowing really , um, what your cycles are. And so I'm always trying to put in structure like show up every day at 9:00 AM to write or, you know, attend this group every two weeks to, to present writing, right? Finding ways to keep myself accountable. And I think there's room for both, but it's been this constant , uh, I mean it's a new way of really appreciating my cycles of rest and then giving myself permission to bow out of things because my cycle of rest came at a time when I thought I was meant to be productive. And that can be tricky to honor relationships. If you're in a partnership and you are meant to deliver something and you're really in a cycle of rest, you might have to kind of negotiate between that and between them . Um, but for me it's mostly about myself. I had this grand plan. I was gonna get x, y , z done in this month and I was gonna get x, y , z done that month. And by building on these things I was gonna get to x, y , Z by the end of the year. And really discovering that my creative system, my energetic system doesn't work that way. Sometimes I just need to cancel everything and like curl up on the couch and read a really good book for a month and do some deep thinking about what's next. And everything in me that is a planner , uh, that likes to map out her life is just like, is just already freaking out. Just saying that. And so again, i I offer you today this idea that if you haven't been working on something recently and you're feeling like you're just up at uh, your own commitments to yourself, that just reframing it and maybe thinking about what are the ways in which your system, your creative insights are resting. What, what ways are you resourcing? Maybe you've been going to dance class more, maybe you've been going to Tai Chi or you've been going swimming or you've been laying by summertime, so maybe you've been laying by a , a shallow pool and just soaking up the sun. There are so many ways in which we need to be replenished. And so I would just offer that , uh, giving it this label that, you know, there's some I've heard who say that they would much rather write their novel in the wintertime 'cause it's already cold and they kind of wanna huddle in indoor and they tend not to write in the summertime because it's so expansive and they wanna be out at picnics and in the park and they wanna be really , um, social, right? So there's seasonal cycles which we already see around us, but how do those match or how do you contradict those? How is it that like everyone's out playing and you find the heat unbearable. So you'd much rather be indoors working on something, you know, and in the winters when you need social because you're just feeling too glom on your own. And, and I think that's what I'm really here to offer you is like get curious about maybe how you're out of step in a way with the world and maybe that feeling of wrongness is just 'cause you haven't yet given yourself permission to have your own rhythms and your own patterns that feed you. And so much of it for me, especially this year of having left Brooklyn and having all this time to myself and moving every month or two has given me such new , um, permission to just do things my own way. And it's been one of the biggest victories, one of the biggest gifts of this year has been to just say, oh, that's just how I do things because I've, oh , I do things weirdly. It's a given pretty much every time and I've always felt really bad about that and felt really , uh, awkward and like I don't fit. And now I'm just learning to, to let that be. And maybe someone relates and maybe they don't and maybe they're cool with it even if they don't get it. And maybe it's annoying, but like feeling much less need to prove myself, much less need to sink up to the rhythms around me. 'cause I don't belong to the rhythms around me. I keep moving. And so , um, yeah, I'm, I'm here to encourage you to make your own rhythms, to honor your rhythms, to listen to when they speak to you, to really practice not pushing through because you think you should and you set a deadline and you have to because there might be way more authentic creation happening if you really let it come from inside and let it come from your need for rest and your need for expression rather than what I always think is the most important thing to do, which is schedule it. So yeah, I'm, I'm hoping you're getting a lot of rest this summer. A lot of play this summer. I do think there's are really good times for that. A lot of sun, a lot of water. And whether you're creating or not, I just invite you to spend some time thinking about how is it resourcing you to be doing either right now be well my friends.