Your private, everyday creative practice is your resistance
No one can take it away from you
Dear WRITE! Clubbers,
The first week of March always feels very special for me.
It’s a week when time blurs and loops, begins moving backwards as well as forwards, falls all over me, moves through me.
This week, when I see the snowdrops and croci pushing up through the hard ground, it’s 2012 and I am back in a windblown park in the centre of York, seeing those same splashes of white and purple and yellow.
I am putting my hands inside my coat and smoothing my taut, round stomach, urging my daughter to make her way into the world.
On that first day of March in 2012, my daughter was already long overdue, and I was beginning to feel flutters of anxiety.
It’s probably a very good thing that I didn’t know, back then, just how difficult it would be for both of us, as she was pulled from that dim, watery world into this one. Each year, over and over, I am filled with thankfulness for her safe arrival – on a full moon night, after three long days of labour – and for all that she brought with her into my life.
My daughter was born singing. Not long after she emerged, as I tried to cradle her in my jittery arms, she opened her perfect rosebud mouth and a crescendo of notes poured out. Trills and rills and full, round O’s of sound.
She will be thirteen next Friday and she is still making beautiful music. She plays piano and sings at the top of her voice at every opportunity. She’s in love with musicals and can tell you every cast of every show currently playing in the West End and Broadway. One day, more than anything, she wants to be up there, singing too.
Since she was very young, she has taught me about the true meaning of creativity. She sees things that I don’t see. She has a way of describing things in words that makes the world endlessly new to me.
Bent over the little white desk in her bedroom, she is the calm, still centre of a whirl of ideas. They find their way from her heart and brain through her fingers and onto the paper. Smears of bright acrylic, sweeping strokes of watercolour, inky curlicues, glued scraps.
Our creativity is something that we share – she and I – every day. Even when I’m exhausted from meetings and marking, we sit at the dinner table and she tells me all the things she’s been writing, painting, making, thinking, learning. She reminds me, everyday, how important this is. I hope that she’ll always remember it too.
We all need creativity. What psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi called ‘little c creativity’1, the tiny acts and experiments and practices that we do each day. They are the sparks and flickers that catch in the darkness. They are the slowness and sometimes the stillness in all the noise and distraction.
Creativity is, in these challenging times, a place you can go to listen to your own thoughts and feelings, to be your unfettered, uncensored self.
Like so many people right now – and especially young people, those who grew up through a global pandemic – my daughter is troubled with anxiety, fears that seem entirely reasonable to me, about what is happening in the world and about how the future might be. What helps her with her worries, more than anything else, is her creative life. I see, over and over again, that finding colour and shape and words for her feelings is a balm.
I know this because it’s the same for me too. When I feel scratchy or niggled or furious or drenched in sorrow, the rhythmic movement of my pen over the page or my fingers over the keyboard has soothed me more times than I care to think about.
The small private act of making something – something real, with our hands, our words, our paint, our breath, out of all those vague and slippery feelings – helps us to feel a little less powerless in the face of events that we can’t control. Moving a line or a phrase around in white space, drawing an outline, deleting and rewriting, rubbing out and resketching, gives us a sense of agency and purpose. It helps us to mould meaning out of all the chaos.
The image at the top of this letter is one of my collaged free writes. I made it in my journal last weekend and I posted it on Substack Notes with the caption: A reminder that your private everyday creative practice is your resistance. No one can take it away from you.
Lots of people seemed to find that helpful. I hope you might too.
Here’s to our private, everyday creative practice – yours and mine, together – whether that is writing or painting or singing or walking or cooking or watching the clouds.
This month, hold a pebble in the palm of your hand. Feel your feet on the earth. Sing at the top of your voice. Don’t let anyone stop you.
And happy birthday, my darling V.
I am so thankful – every single day – for you.
With love,
Sophie xoxo
✨ Get 50% off WRITE! Club forever. ✨
In honour of my daughter’s birthday, International Women’s Day and creativity every day, I’d like to offer you a small gift.
For the rest of this week (until 10 March 2025), if you take out an annual subscription, you’ll get 50% off forever (for as long as you keep subscribing). An annual subscription is £120 right now so, with 50% off, it will be £60. This includes a special video workshop each month that you can write along to. (This month, it’s about creative power – finding it, nurturing it, using it, sharing it.) And there’s also an invitation to our live Zoom WRITE! Together workshops every other month. If you’re not a paid subscriber already, I hope that you can join us. We’d love to meet you.
If you’re not able to stretch to a subscription (I know that it’s really difficult for so many of us right now), please drop me an email and I’ll ‘comp’ you a three-month subscription for free.
📌 Paid WRITE! CLUB subscribers, keep an eye out for your special recorded video workshop for March, coming very soon! 📌
Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. 2013. Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention
Thank you, Nicola! That's so kind. Where have 13 years gone? 🫣 ✨
This was so beautiful to read, Sophie. It’s hard to believe it’s been thirteen years. I adored the photo caption about bending to take a photo of the flowers! For some reason that just made my whole body smile.
But THREE DAYS of labor? Oof. Every time I read about a difficult delivery, I think of The Red Tent. I haven’t read that in decades, but that book reframed so much for me, and as I thought about it again in this context I started appreciating all the “red tents” in our lives, like your writing group (and your friendship and mentoring over all these years), and even how our creative practices and engagement in passions (like V’s singing) create ephemeral red tents where we can feel safe, held, seen, nourished, accepted by community, and cared for, even in our sometimes great pain and distress.
What a beautiful piece. Thank you for all of this. And a VERY happy milestone birthday to V!