What you really, really want
All acts of creation begin with creative desire, and inside that desire are the seeds of your most original work. As women, we are taught to suppress and ignore our desires, which is why they so often arrive as an ache or discomfort instead of a clear signal. Learning to hear them again is the first move out of creative underexpression, and the beginning of a fully expressed creative life. Three prompts to help you start.
My five-year-old son has been talking about wanting a penpal for weeksmonths.
I was so into it. We brainstormed about who could become his penpal. We decided on his friend Maya, and we discussed paper options. I thought I was winning the mom game with all of my YES-ANDING.
He kept asking to write a letter and mail it. I said yes!Of course, babe! But I don't sit down with him and do it because where in the hell did I put those envelopes. And his sister is peeing on my leg. And this doctor's appointment. And. And. And.
Weeks pass. Then a month.
One morning, he wakes up asking again whether he could write a letter. I half-heartedly tell him we will try to make time for it before breakfast. And then I burn the pancakes. And I forget that it's recycling day. And. And. And.
Later that day, he has a next-level meltdown and throws an ice-cream play-dough maker at my head. At one point I am running away from him while he tries to bite my hand. What is wrong with him? I rage-say inside of myself while trying to calmly name his feelings using my best Dr. Becky sturdy leader parent script.
Finally, he quiets and says: Can I have a hug? What's going on for you right now, I wondered aloud. I was so exasperated and did not know.
I just really wanted to write that letter to Maya, he said.
OH.
Everything is fine
Creative desires don't always need to be addressed immediately. But if left unattended or pushed aside for too long, they start to make their voice known in other, usually inconvenient ways.
Unexpected irritability at your assistant or your spouse. An epic meltdown. Burnout. A hard-to-shake lack of aliveness (When everything is just… fine). Anxiety.
All acts of creation begin with creative desire. Inside of this desire are the seeds of our creative potential.
To pay attention to and follow our creative desires is one of the most essential aspects of creative health and a fully expressed life.
And yet.
We are trained to negotiate ourselves out of what we want.
We live in a culture that does everything it can to keep us from our truest creative desires, since its very survival depends on telling us what we want.
As women, we are taught that our desires are not welcome if they don't involve caregiving or making someone else more comfortable, and they always require an explanation or justification.
Instead of nurturing our desires, we learn to be at war with them, and to suppress, ignore, and negotiate ourselves out of what we truly want.
Consider asking yourself:
Growing up, what did I learn about creative desire? And how is that showing up in my process now?
Creative desires don’t lie.
Creative desires evolve into our most original expressions, and reveal new parts of ourselves. They make themselves known to us before concrete, linear plans, and any sense of viability. Another amazing thing about them: they don't lie.
Creative desires are especially important to listen to when we are going through periods of creative plateaus, stuckness, metamorphosis, reinvention, expansion, and grief – whether individual or collective.
Take heed: they do not fit neatly inside of your life as it is now, because their one big job is to expand your life.
And so: your creative desires will often make other people in your life — and your inner critic — uncomfortable.
Listen to the ache.
These truths, combined with the crappy cultural conditioning around desire means that when creative desires come to us, instead of feeling beautiful and warm, they often feel like an ache. Angst. Anger with nowhere to go. A quiet longing.
We've been taught to solve or fix these culturally inappropriate feelings instead of considering that they might be creative desires trying to communicate with us.
When we finally sat down to write, my son's face lit up. We wrote and mailed the letter and I did one too and he couldn't stop smiling and I was so into it that I pitched a weekly family letter-writing ritual and he was like easy tiger let's just mail this one and go from there.
But it was a joyful process and much less energetically costly than putting it off another day. Creative desires don't need us to drop everything, but attending to them can catalyze miracles.
3 prompts to unlock creative desire
When it comes to this chapter of my life, what do I want to create?
If anything were possible — and I couldn't fail or disappoint anyone — what do I really, really want?
What is my deep self most longing for right now?
Something I learned at 40 that I wish I'd learned at 5: your creative desire is meant for you.
If you have a desire, especially one that won't let go of you, you are meant to bring it forth.
If that resonates, maybe this is the sign you've been looking for.
The Desire Experiment
For the next 7 days, listen to your creative desires.
Be open to new and familiar desires. Treat them as if they matter and are worthy of your attention. Don't question their validity, demand a practical justification, or negotiate with them. Just listen. Identify patterns. Write them down if you dare.
Then choose one that you're drawn to and hang out with it for 15 minutes. You don't have to produce anything or go after a result. Witness it. Journal on it. Look at it from different angles. Make it a playlist. See where it takes you.
“But desires aren’t responsible.”
New motherhood kicked up my already flourishing perfectionism to such debilitating levels that caused me to mainly ignore my desire to write for the last several years.
That's nice that you want to play around with your writing, but you don't have time, a voice in my head says. Because clients and kids need your attention. Because people don't want to read what you write. Because the polycrisis. Because. Because. Because.
In a scarcity-driven, linear time model, nurturing a creative desire means you are taking energy away from other, culturally-proclaimed "more important things," and that creative desires can be addressed only after the responsibilities of life are dealt with
Let's be clear: the psychological, physical, and emotional demands of raising young kids or caregiving or leading teams or maintaining your humanity in a broken world are REAL and they legitimately take our time and energy away from creative work, and at times can even make it impossible.
But what if…
What if our desires aren’t selfish?
What if our creative desires matter anyway? What if they matter more than we think?
If our creativity is the fulcrum around which all the other relationships of our lives work, what if attending to one creative desire is a powerful way of nurturing our relationship with our creativity, which then nourishes and expands all of our other relationships?
And what if they are a way of fighting back? Our culture thrives by telling you what you want, so it can sell you solutions to problems it invented for you. It depends on our quiet, our creative contraction, and our feeling out of trust in this most essential relationship with our creativity.
The creative act is an antidote to oppressive control. Creative desires are the seeds for creative action, and the creative act is an antidote to oppressive control.
We were our conditioned to believe our desires are selfish, but what if they are generative? Revolutionary, even?
Which is why the letter you keep not writing was never a small thing.
I am human.
This essay is a labor of love written by yours truly. I wish robots could do my laundry for me while I write. I hope it’s helpful to you. If you have suggestions or topics you'd like me to write about, send me an email at hello@lizkimball.com.
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