why was I avoiding my creativity - working thru week zero of the hikers way
my path to restore my music practice: overcoming resistance, building templates, and holding myself accountable.
Since June I have been in a deep hermit period, working daily on The Hikers Way, and now that it’s out in the wild, I get to dive into all of the lessons myself. (woo!) It’s time to recover my music practice, a creative habit that I’ve abandoned and returned to throughout my life, which should come easy, but often doesn’t.
Experiencing the work of The Hikers Way for myself felt like the start of a new semester, I listened to all of the episodes of Week Zero, I took notes on my tools, I was ready to hit the ground running. But, healing from a spinal injury while adapting to neurodivergence is never linear. My own brain threw me a curveball as I tried to ease into this experience, my old depression came rushing back like a torrent of an alpine river after the first hot day of summer.
After returning from a big community care trip to Chicago, I found myself feeling far more downtrodden, my internal monologue cried out “you need to hike 10 miles, then you’ll feel better” but I couldn’t. My resistance had calcified, a few really bad pain days for my spinal injury back-to-back hit me like a wall.
I stayed home where old poor habits crept up and held me down. I found myself scrolling so much that my daily screen time was reaching almost 6 hours a day. I had my studio all set up, just waiting for me to show up and try and make things. But I kept avoiding it. What the hell, I thought, this isn’t how this is supposed to go.
I suddenly became my own ideal student, one who needs more accessible support in adapting a program that isn’t rigid and considers my brain’s unique needs.
Step one was getting out of my house. This is the most crucial part of why I wrote a creativity course focused on getting out in nature. It is the only cure these days for getting me out of a doom loop, which is where I was headed. Leaving in a foul mood, I drove to the trailhead that I knew was the flattest and wouldn’t inflame my back, walked my 100 feet or so to the bench nearby, sat down, and started writing in my Notes app.
Staring at the golden and purple hues of grasses fluttering in the wind and listening to the Mockingbirds run through their sound library, I considered the first big question on my mind: Why do I avoid making music? Why do I want to scroll instead of practice?
Scrolling short-form platforms like TikTok or even watching some YouTube channels are quick dopamine hits that allow me to easily avoid the confrontation with my emotions and grief of the moment. People I loved were dying. My plan to move away failed. These are all moments where I could be feeling something. That need to be feeling, even when its dark or unwanted emotions, is where my best art comes from. The practice is where the healing happens.
While sitting on the bench watching, another answer revealed itself — I was overwhelmed by the aspects of the skill that I’ve forgotten. Once you are out of practice with something, especially a musical instrument or software for awhile, it is going to feel raw and awkward to start up again. There is defeat and shame sitting beneath the surface under the recognition that I let my skills slip. That shame of loss is like a bottle stop. Keeping me consuming and stuck rather than trying to change.
Making music has so much cultural baggage right now. From inconsiderate ai ceo’s saying “no musician enjoys making music anymore” to streaming services paying artists fractions of pennies, I had to remember, I wasn’t trying to monetize this or start a business. This was about raw, hustle-free creativity. The fact that, as humans, we need to make art. I just needed to make art and detatch from the outcome for once!
Over on Discord, an awesome human also navigating ‘week zero’ asked about the need for a daily creative practice to happen the same way, and the same time, everyday. While this method probably worked and sounded great for the author of Atomic Habits, the daily capacity of most people is variable, not fixed. My body was letting me know that I had to find ways to compassionately adapt and ritualize the experience.
What would it mean to take simple steps to show up and let myself think? To show up in gratitude for what I felt capable of each day.
My accomodations ended up looking like this:
Lowest, absolute-zero-energy-in-the-tank version of my practice is to listen to songs I love and gently move to them. This takes me out of the consumption of screen time and puts me in a place where I am letting myself feel the things in my body. Right now, I am really into the album Naked by The Talking Heads (I just picked up the CD! I’m a nature boy!) and Hayley William’s new record Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party. Both, very different, but both get me moving around and feeling into music. This isn’t about producing something, but remembering what its like to feel.
Next level in the energy-tank for me with my music practice is to just work on simple step pattern. Whether that’s in GarageBand on my phone or on an instrument. Whether I’m collaging prerecorded loops or goofing around with the sound for a pattern, I just need to try and practice. This allows me to not be attached to outcome and see what happens if I do something to gently start.
The other night I wanted to work in the same key as a song I was into that week, but I didn’t want the pressure of perfecting it. My spouse was kind enough to make sure that the template I needed to start was setup and working (thank you Wes!) So I loaded in a simple pattern, added a bit of weirdness to the sound, and felt pretty good about what came forward and it felt very early 2000s. You can listen to the clip below.
When my energy-tank is about half full, that’s when I’ll dig into covers. Learning from how my favorites have done things and figure out what I can learn from letting art come through my body in a new way. Listening for how they might have achieved a certain sound or layered things can help influence where I want my work to go. In the past few months I’ve been collecting and saving chord patterns into the app Obsidian. There are days where my capacity to learn something new activates me more than serves me. But when I feel ready, this type of creating allows me to connect with my influences and intuition at the same time.
The next level, when I’m feeling a bit more confident is to improvise. These can often feel like the most vulnerable and raw experiences when tending to my practice with music, but they are often the most powerful. Often when I let myself do this, I break down in the most cathartic way. These practice sessions are likely going to have the most tangible meaning. This higher energy experience is something where I want to require more reflecting, taking notes on the outcome. How did it make me feel when I did it? What emotion was revealed in the experience of making that held gentle significance, a reason to return? I have a feeling these will quickly become my favorite sessions.
Lastly, and this is the one I resist the most and the one that absolutely gets in my way is software/hardware skills, troubleshooting, and systems building. Learning the software and the technical aspects of music production is a big activator for me to shut down almost immediately. I need a full tank of energy and a really regulated mental and emotional state for this as it forces me to pivot between creative and analytical thought. It activates my demand avoidance but the satisfaction I get by making databases, organize the layout of the different sounds, or figuring out how to mix my own sound colors from scratch (ambitious, I know) rather than just using presets allows me to further lean into the emotional tone of what I’m doing and it feels so, so good.
Back in 2021, I could do this almost daily and be patient with software struggles. But now? It is the very thing that makes me avoid playing at all. So I need to be careful and wary of how expecting a high energy and high focus out of my creative practice might not be the kindest thing to me. Especially not daily. I need to just be open to when it happens and allow it to flow through.
Moving forward after every music practice session, I’m going to try and take note of the way I feel each time tap into the hobby. Then I’ll write these on post-it notes, putting them around my studio and home reminding me what happens when that feeling of creating really clicks for me.
Hopefully these five different levels of mine will help you come up with something similar. If you are feeling lost as you navigate week zero please, go out to the trail and open yourself up to the possibilities of what being in nature can reveal to you in terms of clear-headedness and self compassion.
Here are my final questions for you in regards to your creative practice for this week if you are building a new relationship with a craft, or rekindling an old one.
What conversation do you hope will come through this medium? What do you long to explore?
How do you have fun together? In what ways do you like to play with this medium?
What would it mean to invite other people to this experience alongside you?
How are you organizing your inspiration?
How is all of this in alignment with your core values?
Remember, “Week Zero” of The Hikers Way which has 4 podcast episode lessons, several activities, and some simple strategies for easing back into your practice is free for all my subscribers here in your Welcome Email. Having trouble finding the link? email me at persistentbloom@gmail.com and I’ll get you setup.
The full version of Season 1 of The Hikers Way, a 16 episode, self-paced, creative restoration class, is available now for $150 and the first live session will be on the 27th of this month!
One final reminder, if you want to ask me questions or steer the direction of this newsletter, fill out this survey! It takes a few minutes. I’ll be answering the questions in my next Youtube video where I’ll be demoing how to use dollar store supplies to make a sketchbook zine with your community.
Until next time, stay creative and find your own ways to persistently bloom ✿
Great article Mel! I think having an idea of what kind of work you can do depending on your energy level is a great way of making work compassionately. I’ve had a lot of experiences where I come up with this awesome idea for an art work and in my eagerness I fail to consider what my energy levels are capable of. And then this activity that is supposed to be fun turns into one with lots of guilt and frustration. A lot of my goals for my art haven’t been able to come to fruit this year and a lot of it is that I don’t have the energy to do all that I would like. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and reading about how I want to be and how to get there. And I think I am coming to terms that living a creative life is a lot like growing a plant. You cannot expect a plant that belongs in the tropics to prosper somewhere cold (at least not without a lot of supportive equipment). In my personal case what I have found to be most restrictive is my own temperament and my day job. And I feel like working on accepting those limitations and finding ways to be creative in-between/ with these restrictions has helped begin to improve my day to day existence.