Wilding Creativity
I’m Still Stuck in Academia
It’s been really hard to finish Substack articles lately. I’ve got three on the go, from paragraphs, to partly edited, to complete and unedited. Just sitting there. I turn towards them with a little judgment, a little writer’s block, and a lot of frustration.
I know her, I know this part of me: the one inside that says, “Hmmm not quite it”, or, “Are you sure? Not sure that’s good enough”. Coming into connection with this one has been years in the making. From this vantage point, I see her as integral to my journey. She actually cares so much about good work. She is part Death Mother, part scholar, part tired, neurodivergent little one. Bless, and thank you. I can say that with my chest. I believe it, I believe her.
But what happens when we feel the urge to create, to write, to dance, to make meaning through expression and all of that expression is shrouded in resistance?
You might have noticed my last two posts were poems, those seem to be coming with less scrutiny. Poems have always felt feral to me, they live outside lines. They know the rules and break them. They don’t need citations or research to validate their cause. They are straight from the unconscious, like a fairy tale. A direct channel to the wild.
In listening to an interview with Margaret Atwood, she tells a story where her 12th grade English teacher said, “Now dear I don’t understand your poem, therefore it must be good.”
Poems can do that, they bring us into the Otherworld, Annwn in old Welsh and Celtic traditions. A place where words are fierce and chosen not because the academic establishment says it’s right but because they drop in, from the Well.
It’s curious to watch myself here, this essay is really about coming into contact with the way my mind is colonized through years in academia. And I succumbed without even meaning to, while actively trying not to. In the above paragraph I’m using examples from experts, from other sources, I’m using big, fun words in Welsh. To prove to you that I know something. This is internalized academia, the fish doesn't know it’s in water. I see it everywhere on Substack, which isn’t to say it’s wrong. It’s just fascinating to see how wild ideas need to be backed up with a reference in order to be valid. And how essays which include excerpts from this author and this thinker and this theologian seem to deepen perspective. I wonder if this is a function of sibling society, as Robert Bly offered. We are without elders, so we look to the few we have (see, I’m doing it again).
I’m not naïve. I understand why it’s important to share research, to show where we learned something. I also wonder what we lose when we do this without question, and with abandon.
Recently, I’ve been reading sci-fi. Octavia Butler to be precise, and I am struck by her wild creativity, her apocalyptic, prophetic world-building. I want to write like that. Not like her per se, but with her tenacity and devotion to something that flows, unwinds. I want something to write me. I’m drawn to artists who create from this place. the Wild Twin, the other one, the part that never had to sit in a desk. The one who doodles on the margins with charcoal and carves strange markings on pine trees with sharp stones. What would that one say? Let her make spelling mistakes. Let her make up words and worlds. Let her be untamed and undone.
In service of keeping this on brand (there it is again, the institution: this must have a point in order to be worthwhile). What if therapy, it’s fundament, is the process of connecting to what is animal, what is alive in us? So that we are resourced enough to move through the layers of learning, performance, posturing, and necessary survival strategies to connect to the place that is unruly? I believe we must have embodied containment to touch the numinous: the eternal, creative potential of the human soul. Perhaps this is the whole point: unlearn who we’ve had to be in order to contact the wild truth of who we are.
I know that the part of me that second guesses my creativity is a result of what I’ve learned, what I’ve seen, what has been said to me. And therefore, wilding her is my responsibility. Same goes for you, dear reader. So my question is, what would flow if we spoke from the unburdened one? From the centre of the wild self?
And what might we say? What truth would come from the chest? What delicious character wants to be given form?
May you create from a wicked, delightful place today.
