Tag Archive for: Creativity

Yesterday I found myself listing all the things I’ve made and done over the last 7 years. I started this list not because I was particularly proud, or couldn’t keep track (although it IS getting harder to do.) I listed them because I was terrified they wouldn’t be enough. It’s a real fear, now that my children are all finally in school. I am terrified that I am going back to the same space I was in 7 years ago.

7 years ago I was waitressing, 7 years ago I was pouring your coffee. 7 years ago Chicago was the purgatory between my previous life as a cubical slave and my future life of big adventure. I’m equally terrified and feel incredibly guilty when it seems that taking the time to stay at home with my children was not the adventure, but just what I did while I waited for it. What if my children have begun their autonomous lives, and I’m still just… waiting.

I tell myself that this is irrational, that this feeling of panic over my own autonomy is normal if slightly unjustified. After all, I’ve done so much in these past 7 years. I tell myself all stay at home parents go through this when their kids go to school, my children are not leaving for good, they’re just leaving for 7hrs a day, 5 days a week… But this month, these last few weeks, have felt like a slow motion free fall. No longer anchored to playgrounds and playdates,  I am left struggling to make sense of the silence.

I have kept myself busy. I marketed and produced a conference and community, I’m days away from launching Where are the Women with Marian, I’m in a hotel room in Portland preparing to speak at an entrepreneur conference, I’m planning another RVSX excursion, and planning new classes and events for the CWDevs community. Despite all this, I feel like I’m standing still. Without the normal constraints on my time, without the tug on my sleeve or demand for a sandwich while I take phone calls, all this action feels like atrophy.

What if, after all this time, I can’t function without the freneticness? What if my hustle was just a way of keeping sane through the routines of parenting small children? What if breaking my day into those tiny pieces of attention was exactly what my creative brain needed? When I mention this confusion of time and pace, my friends tell me to slow down, take a breather… but these are my childless friends, my friends that haven’t been waiting 7 years for their lives to be even remotely their own. These are friends that don’t understand that the constraints of full time motherhood that made my accomplishments seem extraordinary last year, are no longer there, and I may just be ordinary, after all. What if I slow down and find I’m just “waitress”, what if this last 7 years of waiting didn’t count, what if I’m just here to pour your coffee?

Looking for a practical list of way to be more creative? You’ve come to the wrong place. Want to think differently? Read on…

1. Procrastinate till the final countdown – I dunno about you but that’s when my best shit comes out. In fact, procrastinating until after the final countdown can really help you get your ass in gear. (Not recommended if you trade your time for money on someone else’s clock – great if you’re a free agent who makes your own deadlines)

2. Spend some time “mashing” ideas. Pick any two unrelated ideas and try to mash them together, find all the secret ways in which they intermingle and then figure out how they relate to Kevin Bacon. Read more

New Business Card

New Business Card

I have my hands in so many projects, I never know what to put on these things. I”m pretty sure this is the dilemma of most modern day entrepreneurs – too many plates to spin, not enough room to spin them. I tried to use Occum”s razor to pair down what I do, cut out most of the businesses that were still ideas and not actually producing anything yet. I also cut out anything I identified myself with that I haven”t currently done in over a year (thus the title Life Coach fell away) I thought Filmmaker was a given, but then… Risktaker and Cakebaker? While both are true, they are total cop-outs, I put them there because they rhymed with filmmaker. Business Cards are just too small these days to convey all that I am doing, although I don”t seem to have any problem crowding in the nonsense.  Does this happen to you too?

(also – does your wordpress theme continuously add extra apostrophes”””””” when you update a post too?)