The unbearable weight of trusting your creativity without knowing if it will work

Week 12: The Bare Minimum Artist's Way

We’re on week 12!!! of our 12-week journey through The Bare Minimum Artist’s Way — our ADHD-friendly version of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.

(who says ADHD people can’t finish things???)

If you’re just landing here for the first time — welcome! We suspended the dogma rules about morning pages and artist dates and did the bare minimum with The Artist’s Way, because we believe half-assing it is better than giving up on Week 3 .

Sound like you? Join us here on Substack and listen to our weekly companion episodes every Wednesday on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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Well, well here we are at the end of the Artist’s Way.

Let’s dive into the final lessons in the Chapter 12: Recovering a Sense of Faith:

You could spend your whole life trying to think creative ideas up, but it will always be true that the real magic happens when we let the ideas come down through us, not from us.

This final chapter (and the whole course) keeps whispering, you can’t control the process. You can only cooperate with it.

Julia Cameron doubles down that our creative resistance is often a form of self-destruction, because it usually feels safer to block ourselves than to risk being seen. It’s feels better to scroll than to surrender.

But creative people weren’t born to play it safe. We were born to be bountiful and live.

Via Pinterest

The mysterious blob phase of your creative process

Everyone creative process has a lot of dark, murky, subterranean wandering, wondering if it’s going anywhere or if you’re on the right path.

And yet, this is usually the most fertile ground where your great ideas are germinating underground for weeks or months (or, let’s be honest, years) before they’re ready to pop their heads out and say hello. It’s why so many of us give up on ourselves before anything good comes to fruit.

This chapter reminds us that creativity begins in mystery and always has a gestation period. Creative ideas, like actual children or bread dough or caramelized onions, cannot be rushed. You have to wait. You have to let them cook. That means no premature launches and no forcing yourself to figure out your next offer before you’ve finished listening to what’s being asked of you right now.

The creative process is a process of surrender, not force. And if you’re like us (little recovering control freaks), that surrender might feel a little like suffocation or death. But it’s actually grace. It’s space. It’s the silence where you start hearing yourself again.

But the problem is that so many of us rush to fill the silence with another offer, another part time job, another binge-able Netflix show. Nature abhors a vacuum, as our friend Aristotle once allegedly said.

But creativity requires silence. You need boredom. You need the patience to sit in the void and work out your trust muscles.

via Pinterest

Playing is the whole point

If your life is cluttered, your creativity will be too.

If you are unfocused, your creative expression will be too.

If your brain is overstimulated, your ideas won’t have enough oxygen to breathe.

If your self-worth is tied to your last post, painting, or paycheck, then creativity will always feel like a rigged game.

But winning is not the point — playing is.

This week calls us to reclaim the sacred silliness of hobbies that are not “productive,” not content-worthy, not necessarily “serving” our careers. We’re talking about things like baking, sewing, sketching, cooking, fixing things around the house. They are not distractions. They are doorways. Doing something mundane with our hands often makes space for something transcendent in our minds.

These mundane or deliberately unproductive hobbies remind us how to take ourselves lightly, how to look for joy instead of significance. We start discovering things we forgot we once loved that make up the little bits of who we’ve always been.

… Digging ourselves out of denial, our memories, dreams, and creative plans all move to the surface. We discover anew that we are creative beings. (p.197 if you’re playing along at home!)

Remembering who you are

This whole journey has been about remembering what you already knew.

The fire of your dreams won’t go out just because you tried to ignore them.

Even when you're stuck at the job you hate and burned out from giving your creativity away for free, there’s a spark in you that doesn’t die.

It doodles in meetings. It makes videos anyway. It whispers when you’re tired and shows up when you least expect it. It’s sneaky like that.

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You are not here to get it perfect. You’re not here to build a brand out of your soul or prove that your art deserves a seat at the capitalist table.

You’re here to express what is trying to come through you. You’re here to make your life a little lighter. A little brighter. A little more you.

So let your art be weird. Let it be bad. Let it be slowly evolving with practice.

Let it be yours.

Thanks for joining us for the Bare Minimum Artist’s Way.

This journey expanded us in many unexpected ways, and we hope it did the same for you!

Let us know what’s changed, shifted, or felt like a breakthrough for you (even if it was just from reading this article!)

If this is your first time reading about the Bare Minimum Artist’s Way, we hope you’ll check out the archive from the last 11 weeks.

Stay tuned for our recap episode of the podcast next week and until then, keep creating.