Content-Generating Machine – or, A Love Letter to Creating
We’re generally good at generating content. We have been as long as we’ve been working together, it was one of the first amazing things we noticed when working as a team. Other people dread putting together a presentation, or writing up a blurb for a document, or crafting an email to get the right message across – we don’t really have problems with that. No big deal, nonchalant shrug.
We commonly refer to this ability we have as a “content-generating machine.” We can – and have! thanks, you-know-who-you-are and your content smashing emergencies – knock out 90 minute presentations in a few hours. Have something to say, put it down, and polish it until it’s beautiful. It helps that we talk about our content between the two of us, for a long time, before we get to the point of putting (metaphorical) pen to paper, but…still. It’s cool, this magical ability that we possess.
…unfortunately for this narrative, we haven’t published anything here in a long time, with the notable and exciting (to us!) exception of last week. That’s because having something to say isn’t enough. You have to have enough soul – perhaps more precisely soul energy – to create. And you have to have even more soul to share what you create in a public place. Take enough soul damage and…it gets progressively more difficult to share.
Having something to say isn’t enough – take enough soul damage, and it’s hard to share.
Creation, and Soul Bruises
Creation requires soul because creation comes from the soul – any kind of creation. Writing (fiction or non-fiction), composing (lyrics or music), drawing, painting, sculpting, building, dancing… the best creative things are outpourings of our souls and their many many moods and feels. Creation is you – the core you that wants to be known and understood and also is super afraid of being alone because of who you really are.
Writing, at least the non-fiction kind that we do, takes thoughts that typically start as impressions and pictures and patterns that we see, and puts them into words in a sentence, and then a paragraph, and eventually an arc of something that’s hopefully interesting and ideally somehow meaningfully true for our audience. It requires paying attention to those thoughts, and weaving them into something that’s linear and logical. It also requires remembering the things that we wanted to talk about that were related, and knowing what’s a finite unit of “blog” or “talk” and what’s maybe a, uh, squirrel trail.
Writing, creating in general, also requires accepting that the thoughts you have, or the soul that you want to share, is worth something – that it’s worth the work of getting it out of your head at all, and also that it’s worth sharing. It takes love, and creativity, and storytelling, and vulnerability. And…if you’re as soul-bruised as we were at various points in the past year or so, well…souls can’t create if they’re beat up too badly. Not easily, anyway.
Creation, and Soul Healing
“The opposite of war isn’t peace – it’s creation.” (La Vie Boheme B, Rent)
The problem with creation requiring a healthy(ish) soul is that creation itself lets you heal. It lets you process your feels, and tell your story. Creation lets you heal the bruises and cuts and scrapes on your soul.
But the great thing about creating is that sometimes, the things that are created have the magical impact of helping other people heal, and process. And when you’re too soul-bruised to create yourself, you can heal in perhaps a less direct way than, say…sharing your soul on a blog.
Maybe it comes from switching to a more private kind of creating, or a different kind. Maybe you find other people’s songs that fit exactly what you’re going through, or maybe other people’s stories tie directly to your experiences – writing them, or reliving them by way of a great author.
Basically, you can heal, and grow, via creating, yes – but you can also heal, and grow, via experiencing other people’s creations.
How to Get Back to Creating
It’s okay. It will happen.
That’s a thing that Laine worries about, a lot, whether her soul will…well, repair (no pun intended, hahaha) enough to have the capacity to create again. That worry is almost certainly a relic of 30+ years of untreated ADHD and feeling like getting her brain to DO the thing was a constant battle.
But…the fact is, it always comes back. When enough has healed, and enough time has passed for some brave to build back up, the drive to create always reappears. Not being alone, literally, helps a lot – as in, creating with someone else and getting that built in support and shared brave.
Be you, and have fun.
When you find you can create, when there’s enough room in your soul to be that core you again, it will just…flow. Your mind and your soul will line up, and everything just…knows what ideas connect where, like building up a Lego wall. If you can heal the damage, and you can get past the critics in your own head, and just… be you and have fun, creation is a wildly strong source of joy. You can let yourself be yourself, and worry about if it exactly “makes sense” or is “valid” later.
If you’re not bruised, beaten, scared of rejection, or simply tired, then creations just…appear out of nowhere.
We interact with a lot of people who don’t create, or who don’t share what they create, for a lot of reasons. If you fall into this camp, we’d strongly encourage you to think about why not, and if you like, send a message our way and tell us, or use us as guinea pigs to share what you create with a very controlled subset of “everyone.” We’d love to hear from you.
For us, once we’ve healed enough to want to create again, the “why not” is always fear – the same fear we see over and over as the core fear of everyone, the fear of being alone somehow. Bruises are just a hurt-reminder of that fear, whispering that maybe it’s really true, that fear that we’re alone…maybe it’s really true.
It’s not true. We promise. Life maybe has sucked, life maybe still sucks, but creation lets you deal with that. And actually dealing with stuff will leave you (has left us) much less alone.