Kick-starting the creativity flywheel

In this piece, I share how nomading has being adding extra friction in my attempts to do creative work. I also share how I'm currently unblocking myself from writer's block.

I had been feeling an increasingly stronger urge to write over the past few weeks, and the urge had become almost visceral in more recent days. At times, I was even feeling anger towards things and people who I sensed were standing between me and my writing. The same kind of anger I would be feeling if someone was literally blocking me from drinking water if I was feeling parched.

Since my partner and I had landed back in London after spending six months in Indonesia, we’d been staying at friends’ houses while they were on holiday. 

While I’m incredibly grateful for having such generous friends, their houses were not our house. We lived out of our suitcases. We were cautious with their belongings so that nothing ended up out of place, or worse, damaged. And when our friends came back from holiday to their home, we tried to make ourselves scarce so that they wouldn’t feel like they were being invaded.

Being able to live in London without having to stay in an expensive bland hotel felt good. Yet it also felt incredibly disempowering to be a guest in my own home city, particularly at a time when we needed to sort out a bunch of high-stakes life admin that required me to demonstrate high levels of decision-making and agency. 

In the weeks that we spent living in friends’ homes, I was figuring out whether I was going to commit to a new job or not, negotiating a specific job offer that had sparked my interest, deciding whether we wanted to stay in London or move to one of the commuter suburbs, and ultimately flat-hunting in an incredibly competitive rental market where rent was almost $1,000 higher than when we had left London.

I was living a whole lot of life in a very short period of time, and so busy that I felt I didn't have time or headspace to sit down and write anything I could share with the world. 

***

Two weeks later, all the urgent life decisions had been made. 

I started writing this piece from my parents’ house in Brittany, France, where I was spending the last ten days of my nomadic travels before I moved back to London permanently and started a new job. 

After having spent the past year of my twelve-month sabbatical living in Mexico, Hungary, Singapore and Indonesia, I was very grateful to be able to spend time in my home country, in a region I’d spent all my childhood holidays in, and in a house that I knew like the back of my hand. 

Nothing about this place was unfamiliar or scary. I could meet all my essential needs with very little friction: I knew where to find food, I knew how to get to the beach and the shops, I had found a space where I can exercise, and there were a bunch of tables around the house on which I could put my laptop on and immediately start working. A far cry from having to get used to driving a scooter around Bali immediately after landing on the island so that I could buy food and a local SIM card, or from having to speak Spanish for the first time in my life at the local market in Mexico to get a hold of enough vegetables for lunch.

For me, being in Brittany was like playing the nomad game on ‘easy’ mode. 

I had decided I would use this time to write a short series sharing some of my experiences while on sabbatical from the corporate world. So on the second day after we arrived, I found a small room in one of the corners of the house and sat down at a desk with my laptop, hopeful that words would simply start flowing.

But they didn’t. 

I was struggling to get words out. 

There was still something standing in my way… and I wasn’t sure what it was so I kept trying. And failing. Words came out incoherently. I bounced from one idea to the other, losing any sense of focus I had managed to build. I got distracted by feelings to the point that I would lose my train of thought.

***

Feeling unsettled is a familiar pattern I’ve experienced many times during my year of nomadic travels. Many times that feeling has prevented me from being able to read, write or do any kind of creative work.

And it makes sense! Getting used to a living environment takes time. 

It would take me two weeks on average to get used to a new place that I was discovering for the first time. Two weeks to get used to the roar of heavy duty diesel trucks from the 1960s driving past our flat in Oaxaca, Mexico. Two weeks to get used to driving a 150cc scooter in heavy Bali traffic while avoiding stray dogs and unexpected potholes. Two weeks to get to the point where my nervous system would stop being hypervigilant.

It never took as much time for me to get used to environments I already knew well, but I’d still have to go through some form of transition to get to a point where I was sufficiently settled in a routine such that my creativity would start emerging again. I had only just arrived in Brittany, and I was also still feeling wired from all the life-shaping decisions I'd had to make in the previous couple of weeks. I was probably expecting too much from my writing too quickly. My nervous system was still in hypervigilant mode.

***

As the days went by and my nervous system slowly returned to its baseline, my writing slowly unblocked itself. Too slowly to my taste. 

This slow process reminded me of something I’d learned as I was doing increasingly creative work like writing and designing while on sabbatical. Creativity doesn’t just appear on command, even if the environment is favourable. To me, creativity is like a muscle. You need to train it to see it grow. And you need to grow that muscle before you can visibly flex it.

As I was sitting at my desk in Brittany, I realised that the busy-ness of the past few weeks had not allowed me to do much creative work in a while… Yet there I was, expecting the same extraordinary levels of creativity as the ones I’d experienced during the most creative phases of my sabbatical. 

My expectations were even higher than usual because I was worried that the new job I was about to start would make it hard for me to keep doing my own creative work on the side. 

I wanted the last phase of my sabbatical to be an explosion of creative output, and I was trying to grind my way through my writer’s block knowing very well that the only thing this would lead me to was a miserable halt.

I felt disheartened. 

***

I still do. But I also feel like I need to do something to get out of this disheartening swamp. Something to make space for my creativity to express itself both now and once I had started the new job. 

So I’ve just made a few promises to myself.

First, I am building a daily writing habit, which is something I’d been meaning to do for a while. Minimum fifteen minutes of writing every day, within the first two hours of waking. This will allow my mind and body to get used to writing as a means to work through ideas and feelings consistently again.

I’ll also publish at least one post a week on a substack I’m creating for this occasion. Minimum 500 words. Publishing will help me connect with others and is an invitation for them (you!) to build on the thoughts I am sharing. Writing for and with a community will motivate me to write more than if I was simply writing for myself.

And I will not put pressure on myself to be creative. I recognise that my creativity flywheel has come to a halt and I will slowly but consistently put in the work that’s required to get it going again. Bit by bit. Every day. Hopefully it’ll be spinning with minimal effort by the time I start my new job.

In the meantime, I will find joy in the process I am starting now. Even if my writing is not where I want it to be, I’ll enjoy it because it means that I’m flushing out the dirty water from the pipes so that crystal-clear and clean water can start flowing through them again when the time comes.

I look forward to having you along on this journey! 

Onwards.

Photo by Daniel Fazio on Unsplash

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More about sabbaticals: whether you're thinking of going on an extended break from work or you’ve already taken the leap, you are right in the middle of an experience that can transform your life in a truly meaningful way. It’s exciting of course, but it can also feel scary, lonely and a bit overwhelming at times.

I’ve created two playbooks to help you on your journey:

• Thinking of a sabbatical will give you everything you need to consciously decide if going on an extended break from work is the right move for you

• On Sabbatical is a self-paced digital experience with insight, structure and resources to turn your sabbatical into a life-changing experience