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| Cartoon by @joseph_melancon |
Sometimes being a parent is crazy inspiring. Your kid
develops new skills that ever impress you. He's generally cooperative. You find
yourself overwhelmed by just how sweet the snuggles are.
Other times, you find yourself drained, at the end of your
rope, relishing the 4.5 seconds you have to go to the bathroom with the door
closed because you can pretend to be alone despite the little hands under the
door.
The last couple weeks have sort of been like the latter for
this Mama & Papa Bear. Little man got sick, which started the domino effect
of us getting sick, too. It wasn't the kind of summer vacation we were hoping
for, but we did take a minute to count the blessings of being stuck at home and
in this together.
STILL, sick kids and being sick is no fun, and it
started this trend of just getting by for a couple of weeks. So when our
anticipated July 4th 3-day weekend came, and we were in good health, we were so
excited for three days to create and regroup.
Only what happened instead was we realized how out of the
groove we were, how uninspired we were. It was that dreaded creative lull, and it
got us pretty whiny.
Luckily, we've managed to climb our way out of this
particular valley for the meantime. This wasn't our first experience with a
creative drought and it definitely won't be our last.
THAT got us talking with each other about the different
things we do to inspire ourselves and reignite our creative flames, and so we
thought we'd share just a couple of those.
1. Indulge
You know sometimes when you're body just tells you it's done
for the day at 7 p.m. seemingly out of nowhere? Our bodies are good at telling
us what they need, and sometimes you just have to give in to a bedtime that
doesn't make much sense. The same is true to an extent with creativity. Now
there is a fine line here between letting yourself waste all the time you have
by watching Netflix, browsing Pinterest and home good stores (Holli) and
watching too much YouTube (Joseph) and letting yourself take a needed break.
But, sometimes we find that just letting ourselves do whatever we want snaps us
out of our funks pretty quickly.
2. Get out of our heads
A creative lull is often caused by either having so many
ideas we don't know what to do, so few ideas that we think we're destined to
fail or thinking about something so much we have trouble acting on it. The
project's too big and daunting or we've built it up too much or something
dramatic. All of it involves overthinking, and in these instances it's crucial
to just stop the madness. That's when we TRY to get out of our heads by doing
some of the more mindless things in life. Cleaning, running (well, not for
Joseph who would certainly NOT be inspired by this task), just going to a new
place...all these things take our minds off ourselves and sometimes just free
our brains up to wander back to where we wanted them to go all along.
3. Get back to our roots
When the going gets tough, it's important to remember
exactly WHY you are doing all this. It's not just meaningless; there was
someone or something that made you think it was a good idea, and we definitely
are the type of people who need reminders of this from time to time. For Joseph,
it's reading comics and watching cartoons and for me, it's reading a good book,
browsing awesome DIYs and recipes and watching TV shows or movies with
compelling stories. Seeing others creating and doing these amazing things
definitely pulls at our inner desires to do the same.
4. Work through it
This is the worst, am I right? But sometimes just biting the
bullet and doing exactly what you need to be doing, no matter how much you hate
it, ends up being the best thing. We both have our daily drawing/writing goals,
respectively, and just sticking with those daily commitments is important to
keeping the dream alive. Working through it leads to actually accomplishing something, and that makes the painful (dramatic much?) days not so bad.
5. Remember how short life is
OK, this might sound silly, but as parents, there is nothing
like our quickly growing offspring to make us realize how fast time goes. And
in the moments where we'd much rather be indulging in some mindless activity
rather than making things, it's helpful to just look at our child and remember
that things are not slowing down anytime soon. Not wanting to live with regret
and not having to tell our kid all the dreams we didn't accomplish are plenty
reason to keep going when we'd rather not.
