Currently reading: Big Magic: creative living beyond fear by Elisabeth Gilbert
The last time I felt really inspired about creating was during the Christmas holidays. My boyfriend and I were visiting my parents between Christmas and New Year when one day before our departure my boyfriend got COVID-19 positive. We moved from my parents and into a rental apartment to quarantine. In that suboptimal situation (luckily my boyfriend had no severe symptoms) I had felt the most joy as far as I can remember. Because we were alone, with limited internet I felt empowered with ideas and visions about what my future life would look like: buy the 2 million house at the end of the seaside street, feel the breeze while writing novels all day every day. This is my intimate version of big magic.
Elisabeth Gilbert has revived this spark in me with Big magic: creative living beyond fear. Elisabeth gives us permission to be creative, suck at it and try again. To embrace it, like nobody is watching, and cultivate it like a precious flame that you want to keep alive. What I like about her vision is simple: you can be creative while keeping your day job to pay the bills. In fact, it is you alone that is responsible for paying the alimonies to creativity and not the other way around. Once the realization settles in that there is no excuse to create, no need to give in your notice and live a YOLO life, no need to be famous, no need to be educated…You can go ahead and imagine, create, plan and dream without boundaries.
But foremost, to do what you truly love and what loves you back. To find the uttermost drive that you were born with and that nobody can hold you back from, even bad critics. Especially bad critics. Once one realizes that we are free of the pressure that we can create for the sake of it and we don’t need to make it our life-earning machine to be serious about it, the magic can start. The sparks have lighted up in me again, to ruminate, create and imagine a world of creative living without the big weight of success hanging from it. Maybe even without nobody ever reading or seeing it. But what counts is that you followed the lead creativity gives you, you continue to pursue it even if you loose track of it for one second, and you never hold back to show your work.
