I decided to dive into my clutter mind this morning and sort out all the notes and inspirational Ebooks I had laying around. I want to create some clarity, both mental and visual, out of my clutter and carnage.
Immediately I found I was overwhelmed of course. That would be the regular mode of my creative mind. I collect the ideas and the inspiration but not always knowing exactly how it will apply to my life, I deposit it into a folder for later. And the papers and laters pile up.
What I see going on is this: I drown in my possibilities rendering myself incapacitated and then I forget. This allows me to stay quiet and un-vulnerable because it all seems like too much stuff. And I never come up with a better sorting system so I keep perpetuating the well-intended chaos.
This is all surface stuff of course. Because I also found a very honest testament of my truest fear in a Lesson from Anna Lovind’s Creative Doer course titled True Clarity. She asked “What are you afraid would happen if you allowed yourself to go fully for what you truly want? What’s the worst-case scenario?” And this is what I answered:
“If I allowed myself to create art, write a book wholeheartedly, I might fail at the one great dream and have no back up dream. I might find out I’m not as good as I think. Or that people are really not that interested. Recognition could be of my talent or my fraudulence. We’ll know if I have what it takes or I have nothing to show for myself and my angst all these years. Total flop. Embarrassment.”
Nothing like retro-reading your uncensored fears to see how sad they are. It’s not that I haven’t read and taken notes on all the right things to do to become a success. It’s my paralyzing fear of risking failure and then failing that has kept me tied in disorganized knots ( a shameful fate for a Virgo). I know and yet fear is paralyzing. You need permission to break the invisible barrier and take a step towards the goals.
So I’ve decided to keep these papers in front of me and keep mulling them over until I make sense of what they mean to me now. I want to wade through my overwhelm and sort through all my past thoughts and notations with a new eye from where I am now. And I have a feeling that I will begin to see a new path emerging. Because I really never want to see these papers resurface. I want to move on from my chaos into clarity.
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I keep the chaos… when there is none, I often create it. You are on to something here. What’s underneath that seems more daunting than this? I exhaust myself with distractions, with too many creative adventures, and then I fall onto a couch as I am doing now, with a cup of tea and a dog, and I wonder which part of it all my heart is really invested in.
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I keep the chaos… when there is none, I often create it. You are on to something here. What’s underneath that seems more daunting than this? I exhaust myself with distractions, with too many creative adventures, and then I fall onto a couch as I am doing now, with a cup of tea and a dog, and I wonder which part of it all my heart is really invested in.
Can I tell you something? That is my same fear. Almost word for word. Battling it daily, hourly at times.
xoxo
When you tell me that you have the same fear, it makes everyone sigh with relief. And it deflates that daggone fear too. Thanks Corrinne!