Creating When You Don't Feel Good

I had a life-changing realization recently that I don’t have to feel good to create.

Much to my surprise, I’ve found that I can sit down to write, paint, or make something when I’m not feeling amazing.

And perhaps this is obvious, but it was sure a revelation to me.

Here’s a nuanced distinction I wasn’t quite getting:

Being connected and in flow with good energy matters in creativity. It definitely helps to have access to my vision and imagination. It’s good to have a solid energetic grounding in what gives my creativity life.

But this isn’t the same thing as feeling emotionally good.

The work I do to cultivate and plug into my deep creative energies is something I do on an ongoing, regular basis and not something I have to capture in a moment in order to do a thing in the material world. I can trust the inner work I’ve done already and also trust myself to access it when it matters, even if I don’t feel it emotionally.

(Plus, it is often the act of creating – actually doing the work – that connects me with good energy and gets me feeling good and in flow).

So sharing in case it’s helpful. As someone who personally benefits from so much of y’all’s creativity, I never want to pass up an opportunity to encourage folks to keep going. The world needs your art.

Our Rage is Necessary

I want to talk about rage.  This emotion is often misunderstood and villainized – pushed away or misused in ways that cause harm or hurt.  But we need our rage, as it serves so many important functions and is a natural response to injustice, oppression, and brutality of all kinds.  Now more than ever, we need the full spectrum of emotion – including our rage – to navigate the world, discern paths forward, and care for ourselves in the midst of hard times and difficult circumstances.

First, I believe rage serves an important function in not letting us forget what’s real. It tethers us to reality, reminds us who we are, and calls us to live in integrity. As an ambassador of the truth, our rage is holy and important.

Rage helps us call out and resist gaslighting (attempts to disconnect us from our truth and groundedness in reality through manipulation, isolation, and denial because we are easier to control that way). Because in addition to the violence, injustice, and villainy that’s happening in the world, we also have to sort through and deal with the cacophony of voices that are minimizing the horror, denying reality, and refuting basic facts. Our rage helps us do this by pulling us back to center, empowering us to set hard boundaries, and connecting us with others around shared purpose and values.

I believe rage does not want to be fixed. It does not want to be controlled, forced, coerced, or judged (to be clear: this is different than choosing our words and actions responsibly in response to our rage).  Rage wants space to move and permission to be.  It wants to be loved and accepted as a valid energy that deserves to exist - that often needs to exist in order to name injustice, transmit information, inspire action, and move energy.

I notice that when I push against an uncomfortable or painful emotion, including my rage, it fights me back, often refusing to let me go until I listen. But when I acknowledge its presence, accept its company, and trust that I’m big enough to hold and be with it, the emotion can more easily do its alchemizing work and keep moving.  Feeling rage is often still difficult, but trusting myself (and remembering my emotions mean me no harm) brings relief and helps me more easily access the gifts that come with surfing the rapids to the other side.

I also believe rage and joy can coexist. More than that, they have to.  Over the past few days, I've been in a constant state of rage - everything from outright fury to despondent anger to steely resolve. I have also intentionally made space for joy, care, and connection.  Last week, for instance, I painted walls with my sweetheart, coached a client I adore, and went dancing with a friend. This was essential.

Rage is a powerful energetic source that we can use and channel into all sorts of goodness: just action, true words, fierce care, creative projects, and bold resistance. So where is the energy of your rage calling you next? What truths are underneath it? What love is fueling it?  And how will you answer the call of that love?

Allowing Anger

As a sensitive empath, anger (others’ and my own) used to scare me.  It felt too loud, intense, and violent.  But my emotional excavations have revealed anger’s vital – and healing – role in naming wrongs, restoring boundaries, inspiring change, and initiating reparation.

Sometimes, I get angry with my clients at work, and lately, I’ve been trying to give myself full and intentional permission to do that.  Yes, these are people who have experienced domestic violence (and often a myriad of other traumas pertaining to abuse and oppression).  And yes, while I know that anger and frustration are common and understandable features of direct service work with folks in high-stress, crisis situations, this is still super uncomfortable.

Which is why I never used to allow it.  Also, because I believed anger was callous and cruel, a violent force wanting to take possession of my body and turn me into an abominable, havoc-wreaking monster of epic proportions.

But no, anger is just a thing we feel.

It’s a powerful energy, sure, but it need not be channeled into explosive action or hurtful judgment.  And it does have to mean wishing someone ill, making them wrong, or denying their worthiness.

Allowing anger in the context of my DV work is important because if I’m going to honor and allow the fullness of others’ humanity, I need to honor and allow my own.  Pushing away anger is really just a feeble attempt at transcendence and emotional bypassing that separates me from the people I’m with and distances me from our shared experience of messy real life.

None of this means I turn to aggression (or passive aggression, the greater temptation being that I’m from the Midwest) to express myself.  Instead, anger is my ally in forming a grounded, assertive space from which to respond and proceed.

This happened recently.  I was angry with a client and was stuck in the same room with them for over an hour.  So I poured that anger into my energetic boundary (Karla McLaren writes about this practice in her book The Language of Emotions – highly recommended) and put my focus there, which allowed me to speak and act from my soft, true center, since it was grounded in and protected by my anger-fortified boundary.

And this is usually all my anger wants from me: a stronger boundary, safe space and comfortable distance, personal power and sovereignty.  But even before any of that, I think my anger, like any feeling, just wants to be felt – and recognized as the valid (and quite ordinary) human emotion that it is.