Create or Die...

The message that came to me.

I woke up this morning with an ultimatum in my mind. I’d had a dream in which I reconnected with one of my writing clients, who is also a friend, after a period of less contact than usual. I called to him and said, I miss you - where have you been?

When I woke, I had this sense that the ‘client’ in my dream was also me: the Soul part of myself, that was actually calling to me. I miss you, where have you been? Why have you abandoned me?

Because these past few weeks I’ve been stumbling around an inner realisation that needed to happen. That couldn’t happen until I had been deep into the Underworld and spent so much time in the shadows there. How do I prioritise my own creativity?

The question has been gnawing at me for a while. Since I scaled my writing coaching business to a small group of clients and started to get really busy. Since I slipped back into my old pattern of prioritising work over me.

But this is nothing new. It’s what I’ve always done. It’s the relationship I’ve always had with work - whether that was at school, or university, or in my profession as a teacher, or in my business. Work comes first. Work first. Play later (read, never).

This belief has been embroidered into my bones.

I grew up with it, inherited it, clung to it, perpetuated it.

As an ancestral trauma, it was a matter of physical, economic and social survival. For myself, it was a matter of deep pride and integrity.

It’s how I got burnt out with Chronic Fatigue when I worked in a school. And it’s how I’ve burned myself out in my business year after year.

Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash

And that’s where the self-sabotage comes in. The ways that my Soul speaks up and reminds me that I’m here to create. That intentionally participating in the Co-Creation is my reason for being alive. So I start to create problems, obstacles, chaos and destruction to liberate myself from the shackles I’ve created. The shackles of work that tie me to my deepest integrity, colliding with my Soul’s deepest vision for my true identity.

It’s no wonder that this opposition keeps pushing me round in circles - lurching one way and then the other - to find a solution. I keep looking outside. I keep looking at my work or my life or my business. And trying to figure out how I can do it differently, so that I can reclaim my essential inner creativity.

But, of course, I’ve been looking in the wrong place.

When I look outside myself and try to fix the things I can see, by stirring up inner conflict between two equally deeply held values and beliefs, it’s not surprising that the results are always messy and never fulfilling.

As I was walking and dictating some draft writing for a chapter in my book this morning, I had an encounter that really helped to illuminate this for me. I was walking along the pavement outside the local primary school, and a taxi was turning right into the school car park. To make the turn, the taxi would need to cross the pavement I was already walking on. So the taxi driver waited while I passed, and I said thank you and carried on.

A mother, walking her young daughter to the school gates, then said loudly in my direction as I approached, “Another entitled one”. To which I gathered she meant me. By which I understood that because I had carried on walking instead of letting the taxi go first, she was demonstrating her apparent belief that she was entitled to judge me because she thought me selfish.

I stopped mid-chapter.

For some reason that I couldn’t fathom, this really hurt.

A woman I had never met and would probably never see again, took it upon herself to express her negative judgment of me verbally, and I felt the heat rise within me as I wanted to cry. I let the tears fall.

What was it that had touched me so deeply?

It was her condemnation of my so-called ‘Entitlement’. Her judgement of me as being selfish. Just for walking along the street and doing what I do. Being who I am.

This is where I realised: THAT is what I’ve been afraid of all my life. Being seen to be selfish for putting myself - and my creativity - first. Being considered a bad person. Not being liked. Not being worthy. Not being good.

It was so tied in to why I still wasn’t prioritising my own creativity, and why every time I tried to reclaim my sense of self, I self-sabotaged instead.

Because, in order to be good-liked-valuable, in order to survive physically, economically and socially, I had ALWAYS sacrificed my own needs and desires - to my own detriment. And when I tried to put myself first instead, I always did it by destroying everything that came before. To burn it all down and start again. Thus putting my deepest inner values into conflict, and starting the self-destructive cycle all over again.

So, this time, I am doing it differently. I am looking within. I am noticing that those conflicting values, of being in integrity in my work and being in my creativity through play, cannot be mutually exclusive. I need them both.

I cannot value one over the other.

And I cannot simply live my creative life in the way that might look like for anybody else.

I am here to be me.

I reclaim my own creativity. And I channel it in the direction of my integrity.

And by doing so, I believe I can be of service to other Visionary Writers and Creatives - who are each searching for their own way.

I love helping my clients to write their books, I love the sense of real value and transformation that I bring to their creative journey; that is not the issue - but it’s the thing I’d been trying to run away from. Because I held this polarising misbelief about work and creativity. That I could only have one or the other - and I needed to work to survive. So, creativity had to go.

Not only was that a misbelief, it has been an extremely harmful and excruciating limiting belief, too. Keeping me small to keep myself safe.

The stakes that were mounting were real enough, and they really mattered to me. My nervous system was at capacity and I needed to take a step back. By pressing on, I only continued to escalate the problem and search for increasingly self-destructive solutions.

But, once I had given myself permission to take that step back - to let go of a few of the things I was trying to hold onto - I arrived at a much more powerful realisation.

My creativity is what drives my passion, fuels my integrity, and makes me who I am. It’s an integral part of my identity. And I don’t need to choose, any more. I don’t need to prioritise one over the other. Work over play. Writing over showing up in my business.

The more I make time for writing in my daily life, the more alive and grounded I feel when I show up for my clients. The more I engage with the reality of creating that balance in my own life, the more I can empathise and guide. The more I lean into supporting other spiritual business owners to become better writers, the better writer I become myself.

So now it’s a win-win, rather than an either/or.

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