Finding My Hunger for Creation Again

The surprising lessons I’ve learned through letting go of expectations.

“I’ve heard from a lot of other women who are feeling lost in a particular phase in their lives, but they don’t know who to turn to or how to find themselves amid the confusion. That’s the thing about evolving in adulthood. There is no college counselor to help guide us along every step of the way; there are no simple hoops to jump through.” 

I used to think my cerebral qualities gave me an edge. Even though I am a highly intuitive person, thinking my way through my work was always a requirement for the work to be “worthy.”

This type of work had to hurt and pass a series of mental checklists before even making it to the “creation” phase. Was it original? Was it worth clicking on? Was it up to my standards? It had to fit into my “big picture” and if it didn’t ladder up to support that purpose, the idea got tossed in the trash. 

All this is well and good if your purpose is sound. But if that strategy is off, or you're working to feel good about who you are, you can find yourself in a never-ending loop of creation paralysis. A self-beatdown is never a sustainable way toward a career. Something will break. Because creativity is never really about the end result. It’s about what comes from the practice of making. 

How Midlife Has Shifted My Perspective

Like many of you, midlife has been a catalyst for me to challenge this “creation paralysis.” My relationship with time has shifted from “I have all the time in the world to make things” to “This is it. I’m IN it and every day counts.” The pressure has formed fissures across many of my belief systems. It’s a kind of death and rebirth that I cannot will myself out of. I am letting go of a lot these days. 

It has taken me years to even be able to access the part of me that can “let go.” With each call to loosen my grip, to evolve, I’ve tightened it. The harder I pushed against letting go of my old ways, the deeper I fell into confusion about who I was in the first place.