On Resetting My Wild Creative Life

Last month I was sitting in a Barnes and Noble reading magazines about writing and looking for both inspiration and refuge.

My left hand was blue from where a nurse had tried his best to place an IV, but the catheter wouldn’t thread. It hurt, I hurt.

My body was howling, revolting. Staging a series of protests and pickets in my joints, in my blood, in the places the skin of my forehead meets my scalp.

The ages of the writers in the glossy pages of the magazine 27, 34. Toni Morrison didn’t publish her first book until she was 39. That has been my personal motto for at least six years.

Flip the page, an eighty-one-year-old woman battling stage four lung cancer wrote until two weeks before her death. Leaving behind dozens of unpublished stories, an unpublished book, and another in the galley stages of production.

Perspective.

I’d been on a solo writing retreat, my first since before the pandemic when the flare hit me. It’s slightly different every time, but the mainstays were there: immediate pain, immediate crushing fatigue. The anxiety in my chest from a rapid onset pain all over my body. Life after a massive flare was a lot of healing physically, but possibly twice as much emotionally. Something about the panic of being acutely NOT okay and not feeling like you will ever be okay again sticks and stays and there isn’t really anything that can get that residue off but time.

What I didn’t know I was searching for in that moment, and in those magazines in Barnes and Noble, was a reset of my writing life, a container through which to structure my creative work. Typically, when that itch would present itself, I would enroll in a class. But this time I was reminded of a conclusion I came to last year. I am the container! Classes are great, but they are not a mama’s dress to hide behind.

Which leads me to now. Not hiding, not putting off the newsletter that I had an idea for 12 months ago. If the twin pandemics of the last two years taught me nothing else, it taught me how important voices are. Individual voices, collective voices. My own Black, Femme, Disabled voice.

What the reset looks like

Stepping back to get quiet and clear about what I wanted my creative life to look like. I needed to step back from the communities that I was carrying the expectation of. I went on hiatus from my YouTube channel, took a lot of time to reconnect with what I want to do. My calling is to write but I also sing, collage, journal. I am multifaceted in my surviving and thriving and I challenged myself to be present and take up space. I challenge myself to not shrink but expand.

Expansion looks like telling my story, giving other people a space to tell theirs. Expansion looks like showing the mobility aids, workarounds, and resources that make it possible for me to show up in the creative work. Expansion looks like setting my highest, biggest dreams in motion on the backdrop of the new moon and to quote my literary mama, Toni Morrison, “standing at the edge and claiming it as center”.