Trying to be Creative in a Global Lockdown

It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post (I suppose now I have no excuse not to!). I just wanted to take the time to write down some thoughts about the current situation and the toll it can take on creatives.

In the first few days of the lockdown, as all of my future work was being cancelled one after another, like a never-ending fairground ride, I was surprisingly buoyant. In retrospect, I think this was because everything stopped. Everyone stopped. Twitter was suddenly full of people in exactly the same boat, needing exactly the same help. Since comparing myself with people on Twitter is one of my saboteur brain’s favourite pastimes, I was finally on equal footing. Nobody’s life or career was any better than mine. Productivity be damned!

Then there was a burst of activity that is continuing as I type. 

Wonderful people all over the country started coming up with brilliant creative opportunities and my brain began to berate me all over again. How can you sit here and play video games when you should be writing for a commission or trying to start a side hustle or organising your tax receipts? Why are you moping? You should do something instead.

And so it begins again.

Lockdown seems to have inspired - in a vast wave of the population - a sense of ebb and flow. One day is good and the next is not, for very little reason. It just is. 

This can be hard to accept. We often batter ourselves into churning out work - creative or otherwise - because of deadlines or obligations, and this gives us the opportunity to ignore our own feelings. Now, without those deadlines and obligations, we have no reason to ignore what we think and feel. 

So I would like to take this opportunity to listen more to my feelings and try to block the gnawing sense of obligation to be productive or creative or anything other than just being.