Is our creative work our baby?
An Idea that Helped me Unfreeze.
In my writing journey, different ideas have helped me get unstuck at different times. One of the really helpful ones came along while I was writing The Empath’s Journey.
It helped me unfreeze at an important point.
This idea comes from an interview in which the author Elizabeth Gilbert talks about the problem with thinking of our creative projects as our “babies.”
She says this in the interview: “There’s a lot of difference between this book and a human baby.” Then, she lifts up a copy of her book Big Magic and drops it on the floor.
“Oh my God, you’d arrest me if I did that to a human baby,” she says as the interviewer laughs out loud. “But I can do that. I can totally do that. I can rip pages out of it, it’s just a thing.
It’s just a thing I made. It’s not a baby.”
Later on in the interview, she says something quite profound.
She says WE are the baby of the work we’re creating.
“And what I have to recognize is, if anything, I have been its baby because everything that I am and everything that I have learned and everything that I have been and become in my life is because of the creative things that I made.”
When I first came across this interview, this thought felt so freeing!
As someone writing a book that sprang from a personal space, it helped me let go of some of the anxiety that writing vulnerably brings up.
It helped me in a very practical way, and was one of the things that helped me finish the book.
AND YET, and yet, even while I was writing the book, and then afterwards, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that our creative projects do feel very close to our skin, and as if they contain our beating heart.
And even as I struggled with my writing, I had dream upon dream of pregnant women.
One was a heavily pregnant woman, almost about to give birth, who was cycling alone uphill, trying to get herself to a hospital.
In yet another dream, a woman was giving birth naked in an ancient bath, screaming and shouting. But in this case, surrounded by many other women who were helping her.
Something in my psyche, some deeper layer, was throwing up these images.
These dreams continued for a while, until something in me finally listened to their message.
I realized that I needed like-minded people around me to help me give form to the book. So, I joined a local meetup group that met in a coffee shop to just sit together and write.
Once I started going to this group, these “pregnant lady” dreams disappeared.
So, I’ve come to feel that even though my book wasn’t an actual baby, on the symbolic level, it WAS.
And just as we often need helping hands, a midwife or a doula, while giving birth, as creative people, we also need midwives – coaches, creativity groups – to help us give birth to our creative projects.
And just as the process of giving birth to a baby is a transformational process, so is the process of giving birth to a creative project.
It asks us to trust, to tap into something bigger than us, to scream and shout while having birthing pains.
There is a weight and a heft to it, and something in our psyche knows it.
And that’s why we often talk about birthing our creative projects and think of them as our babies.
So, in the end, I think there is value in BOTH these seemingly paradoxical ideas.
Sometimes, it serves us to not get too serious, and to think realistically.
Our book or our painting or our multimedia project can be misunderstood or even ripped apart.
But because it’s not a real baby, it will never get hurt.
But at other times, and especially when we’re creating something that feels like our heart walking outside of our bodies – like a memoir, for example – we have to let ourselves admit to the pain of birthing contractions.
We have to let ourselves feel the weight of the idea gestating inside us.
How can we walk more easily with it?
And how can we be more self-compassionate as we go through the different stages of this strange pregnancy?
As it often is, I think the truth is two-pronged.
Your creative work is your baby AND it is not your baby.
And playing with these two keys can help open those invisible doors that feel closed today.
Sometimes, one key fits.
But at other times, the other one does.
Ritu Kaushal is the author of the book The Empath’s Journey, which TEDx speaker Andy Mort calls “a fascinating insight into the life of a highly sensitive person.”
Find more about Ritu here.