How isolation will help get your creative mojo back

Imagine this picture in your minds eye – the genius artist, writing, painting, creating away by the flicker of fading candlelight, impoverished in a flea ridden, rat infested dark attic, slowly going mad, having no visitors, tea and crumbs for dinner, with paint fumes rising into their lungs, coughing and wheezing in ill health, all in effort of make a living from the ‘pureness of art’. Sounds like an epic enduring story. That’s because it is a story, kind of like a fairy-tale.

Stories are fun, they re-enforce familiar cliché’s, politically agenda’s, narrative’s that serve social agenda’s and sometime became the ‘normal’.

Ok, so why am I sharing this tale of woe with you?

Well, because, I am making a big leap from one abstract idea to another idea, to highlight that being creative during isolation, will NOT turn you into an artist who is starving in the garret.

I am also sharing this with you because; the longer we are COVID 19 isolation, the longer fear, uncertainty, and anxiety sets in. The honeymoon of ‘having some extra time’ is well and truly wearing off and we have hit a threshold, we want our normal lives back. But there is no normal now; there is only a new normal.

 In isolation, consider these three creative mindsets:

1. With more time to reflect on the state of your life, you have an opportunity to re-assess your previously busy, stressful way of living. You can see this time as an opportunity for positive & creative growth.
2. In the midst of this change, you have time for a creative hobby; to pick up a long forgotten creative passion, or re-kindle a long-held secret creative desire. Tapping into your personal creativity is a way to access more meaning, purpose and we need much more of that right now.
3. With a new normal mindset, your natural curiosity and creativity will bring your creative mojo back. Embrace this time as freedom. Being playful will spark imagination in your everyday life.

Now, consider these three creative toolsets:

1. Reflect
   Keep a journal for the next 10 days. Write down insights from your time in isolation. Write about the state of your life prior to isolation, write about your life in isolation, write about what your life might look like after isolation. Just get it written, let your hand take the pen and gently guide you across the page. Write for 20 minutes each day for 10 days. Consider it a meditation. After 10 days, check in with yourself; can you see any patterns or re-occurring issues coming up everyday? Has anything shifted? After check in, commit to another 10 days of writing, then another and so-forth.
2. Connect
   Right now, the online world is packed full of people doing virtual meet-ups, video conferencing and online events in an effort to stay connected. Scroll through Facebook, Eventbrite or Crowdcast to find what is happening in your area. Or find a creative theme or activity you are interested in and join.
   Every Friday night via video link, I host the ’Ultimate Creative Girls Night In’. It is one way we can support each other and take steps to re-claim our creative mojo through social isolation. There is no instruction, it’s just a safe space to connect and create. Some knit, some draw, some paint, others collage, up-cycle furniture and others come just to hang out in a creative space.
3. Play
   Help coax your creative mojo back to life by giving natural curiosity a nudge. Play with small daily acts of creativity to build creative muscle. One simple, easy way to start is to consider your home, space and life like an adventure and not a garret barely holding up a starving artist. Loosen that grip on your inner critic, basically, tell it to ‘bugger off’, (that’s something an artist from the 18^th century would say).

The moral to this new normal story is, don’t starve your creativity out because of isolation, feed it, water it and watch it grow. You are going to need her, in fact you will come to love and rely on her, because she is leading the new normal.