Inhabiting a creative headspace

Issuing you a challenge

It’s a choice not to feel inspired.

It probably hurts to hear that. After all, we don’t choose our feelings in a literal sense. They just happen. But nothing occurs in isolation. Our emotions are often a result of our habits, our lack of resourcing, our environment, our thoughts. And right now, your habits and thoughts are creating an environment where you feel uninspired.

You’ve decided that some emotions and experiences are worthy to make art of/from and others are not.

You’ve gotten so good at dismissing and ignoring the inspiration that floats through your head and by your window that you’ve trained your attentional filter to disregard them. If you notice them at all, you quickly realize what they are—”shower thoughts”, boring feelings, “just a patch of weeds” you pass by every day on your way to the bus stop—and your brain turns off. “Nothing worth inspecting here,” you say. And then you move on, your world feeling even more dead for it.

I’ve been trapped in this loop for more of my life than I’ve found myself on the other side of it. When I fall off my routine of creating—of mining the present moment for inspiration—I land here all over again. Feeling like nothing I say matters. Like nothing I feel is intriguing enough. I while away the hours waiting for another peak experience to pass by when I’m doing absolutely nothing to cultivate an environment where that could happen.

See, I’m not saying all this to shame you. I’m saying it to shake you awake. Just as I need a good shaking sometimes. The truth is that we all do. There’s so many flashy, stimulating diversions beckoning our attention these days that you’d have to be superhuman to resist them.

Your headspace has been terraformed, seized by corporate interests, transformed into a barren wasteland.

You have become disconnected from yourself.

Of course you don’t find yourself inspiring. Of course you don’t perceive your life to be art waiting to be discovered. Your point of view doesn’t have enough jump cuts. Your inner monologue is lacking action. Your emotions are not frenzied and fraught enough to compete with the glowing screen in your pocket. Your slice of life is stale compared to what you see depicted in the media around you.

But this is all a matter of perspective. It’s not the full truth of greater reality. It’s simply the reality you’ve been sequestered in. You’ve been here so long you think you want to stay.

But you are miserable. Your bowels groan from all the oil in your media diet. You are tired of what you’ve been fed and the only reason you don’t adjust your intake is because you think salad sounds boring. But that? That’s just your lack of ingenuity speaking again. Because creativity, ingenuity, is an inculcated trait. It is practiced. And if you were being honest with yourself, you have no idea where to even begin practicing it.

Giving your thoughts more weight

You might recall from one of our conversations on the Void recently that I challenged you to check in with yourself throughout the day and get curious about what’s bubbling there. You might have also tried that and come up with tumbleweeds. You might have taken a gander at inner space, gotten instantly bored, and moved right along without doing anything. This is because it takes a significant act of momentum—a serendipitous pattern interrupt—to rewire your brain’s habit of dismissing your own Genius.

You need to force yourself to engage with those thoughts and feelings. You need to show your brain that there’s something there worth paying attention to. And then, you need to make those thoughts a little more real by allowing them to take up physical space.

Take it from me, the airiest motherfucker alive: it’s rarely enough to just notice your thoughts and inspiration. When you allow that shit to live in your brain, it continues not to feel very solid or substantial or even remotely important. And without slowing down long enough to really feel the quality of it, to deeply appraise it, there’s no incentive for you to remember it.

All your inspiration will float on by. “Huh, that’s an interesting thought,” and then ~poof~

Going, going, gone.

So what’s the solution? You write it down. Not on the notes app in your phone where everything of interest is compressed to a series of ones and zeroes, flattened and buried where you’ll barely notice it sitting there between Instagram and X and the colossal collection of memes you never look at again.

You need to give it physical weight. You need to be able to feel it on your person in a way that registers as more than the paperweight you use to access the internet, text your friends, and a million and one other things.

You need a pocket notebook.

When you feel the notebook in your pocket, you think of your ideas and your inner world. There is no other task associated with this little book. Don’t worry, you can still write grocery lists and to-dos and lists of your favorite coffee shops in there—that “junk” holds creative magick, too. But what you won’t do in there is enter mindless consumption mode such that the entire book becomes associated with a headspace you’re trying to spend less time inhabiting.

Now, you’re not going to remember to engage with this little book at first. That’s okay—it’s not part of your routine! So you’re going to set an alarm on your phone to check-in 3 times a day.

What are you going to write?

Whatever-the-fuck!

You can simply write “squirrel” because you saw a cute little guy scamper across the tree limb right in front of you. You can write “am angyyy, grrr” because you’re cranky and also cute at the same time. You can write a collection of random words or images that pop into your head.

It doesn’t matter what you write in there.

But here’s some prompts to help you out if you need a little structure to feel secure:

Pocket notebook check-in questions

• What are you doing?

• What’s happening around you right now?

• What do you feel in your body? Describe it as a sensation, shape, color, texture, image, etc.

• What are the first 3 words that pop into your head when you feel into the present moment?

• What are you craving right now?

• If you could drop everything and go do something, what would you do?

• Who is the last person you talked to? Summarize the conversation. What impression did it leave?

• Walk back through your day. What is the most profound thought or experience you’ve had?

• If you were an animal or mythological creature/character, what would you be right now?

• Close your eyes and feel into the space right outside your body. What color or texture is your aura?

• Describe what’s happening around you or an event from your day as if you’re explaining it to an alien.

I challenge you to make up some of your own check-in questions as well. Get goofy with it. Get silly. Make it fun and you will look forward to this aspect of your day.

Bonus points: For extra magick, after I’ve written in my pocket notebook, I like to take a deep breath, clutch it to my chest, and exhale while imagining a green beam of light shooting directly into my notebook. Afterwards, I say “thank you” to all of my parts who came forward to connect with me, bringing me fresh inspiration to enjoy. (If I’m out in public, I usually don’t clutch it to my chest because it feels quite intimate to charge one’s notebook with a Care Bear blast of pure heart energy and I’d just rather people not know that I’m doing it. Also, I’m still a little embarrassed by what a Pollyanna I’ve become at my big age. I’ll let you know if that ever changes.)

Monthly Pinterest collage challenge

This is one that I have recently devised for myself. During the Pisces lunar eclipse, I had felt inspired to make a collage of some recent goings-on in my life using Instagram stories—creating cutouts by pressing down on objects in the Photos app on my iPhone and pasting them on a background in IG. I also used Capcut to create an overlay of a recent video I had taken of an armadillo sighting, adding my cutouts on top of it.

It was such a fun experiment that I decided (for the foreseeable future, because a mercurial hates rigid commitments) I’m going to make one of these little collages every month after the first quarter moon and release them with the full moon as an offering.

This month’s collage

graygarland

A post shared by @graygarland

I’ve been wanting to create more personal work and had already decided to start sharing more creative non-fiction essays so this seemed like an excellent way to build on that and share more of myself. I’ve also discovered that, while I meticulously catalogue inspiration that I gather in a dedicated album in my Photos app and have found that very useful in encouraging me to notice and collect more inspirational artifacts from my environment, it’s not quite solid or substantial enough to keep the tab open in my brain. In the few weeks since I issued this challenge, I’ve taken way more pictures when I’m out in the world and just around my tiny little one bedroom apartment.

So now, I’m issuing this challenge to you!

If you are a very visual person/processor like me, I want you to try creating a monthly collage of your own. For this, I recommend that you use Pinterest—that way, you can easily supplement the photos you take with ones you find while cruising the internet. After all, no one said you can’t draw inspiration from junk food media. Junk food is art, too! It just shouldn’t be your entire media diet.

You can find out how to make these collages here. And just to help you remember, I recommend setting an alarm once a day or maybe 3 times a week to help keep this creative task fresh and at the forefront of your mind.

So, go on, friend! Mine your life for inspiration! And if you feel like sharing, I’d love to see pictures of your scribbles and collages if you’d like to tag me on Instagram or Threads. I’m @graygarland on both.

Happy hunting!

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