For the past several years, I’ve been on a mission to embrace, explore, and express my creativity - basically, reclaim it from the clutches of academia, where creativity was encouraged, but limited to the parameters of the Chicago Manual of Style and the norms of scholarly discourse. Since then, creativity has infused my life with newfound vitality, expansion, and imagination. It’s propelled me toward risk and adventure. It’s led me to new edges of self-expression. And as with any energetic leap forward, it’s also illuminated some patterns and shadows to be processed and untangled along the way.
Productivity is one of the more consistent themes that’s come up in the process. I often notice that when I’m unproductive in my creativity (like when I feel energetically blocked or artistically blobby), I get frustrated and a little panicked over the time and energy I’m wasting and losing in the process.
When I’ve looked more closely at all of this, I realize: it isn’t untrue. I do waste a lot of time, energy, and potential. I throw away a lot of what I create or could create. And this is okay. More than that, it’s essential.
Because we are organic and evolving creatures, our systems need space, give, and excess. And our creative projects, also organic and evolving, need the same. We need the nourishment of composted waste and recycled dead things to continue to grow and expand.
As I’ve found again and again, creativity defies notions of productivity as linear progression and absolute efficiency (which is what makes art such a fierce, defiant, and effective challenge to capitalism, as well as an essential tool in rewriting narratives around value, labor, and production). Whereas capitalism tells us we need to function like machines – staying in zones of activation, overdrawing our resources, and maximizing output at all times– creativity reminds us that moments of stagnation and slowness are part of the process, which not only allows for convoluted wanderings and wasteful inefficiencies, but actually requires them.
Whenever I waste my creative potential – for whatever reason – I am often tempted to either send it away to a landfill so I don’t have see or deal with what I lost, or, out of denial, stuff it in a jar with some preservatives and put it on a shelf, so that I can pretend nothing is lost.
But there’s also a third option I’ve been trying to practice more and more. And that is composting the wasted thing – burying it in my own garden, so that it can be recycled and incorporated back into my system. But here’s the thing: the catalysts that instigate this composting process are the feelings of grief, regret, and frustration over what was wasted. I have to feel this stuff to compost the loss. Which means I carry the residue of the loss (even as it’s transmuted and transfigured) in my garden forever.
But this is creativity and creation in general. Waste, death, and break-down are part of what makes it possible and sustainable – together with the beauty, flow, and alchemy, all of it opening a path ahead that – paradoxically – is both well-worn and uncharted.