In an online poetry group I’m a part of this month, our first post was to answer the question, what do you bring with you to this group? My response was: I bring willingness and effort despite judgy blobs of resistance. I bring a curvy notebook that I’ve been filling like mad for the last month, though poetry is only now starting to sneak in. I bring a return to the artist I was as a child. I bring loosening reigns. I bring patience (I hope) and a reverence for noticing. I bring the question, what will happen if I give this my all?
Another participant commented on how much she liked the phrase judgy blobs of resistance as a description for the inner critic, so I started thinking about how it came about.
A couple weeks ago I was feeling a lot of resistance to pretty much every idea that popped in my head or every step I could take toward my creative goals. Immediately after having a thought of something I could make or wanted to try, resistance came in and slammed the idea door shut.
So, one morning I decided to draw my resistance. Before the critic could pop up and tell me what a stupid idea this was, I picked up my pen and the pretentious judgy blob monster appeared on the page. Without too much thinking, I drew a number of the blob monsters and wrote what came to my mind: Pretentious judgy blob monster….thinks he’s intelligent and artsy…but is just an insecure asshole….who is scared of everything.
Yup. That’s him. Scowls, eye-rolls, and all.
When I was done, I felt I needed to name my self-compassion side too. What came up were the wonky cats I’d tried to draw a week or so earlier from Melissa Dinwiddie’s Creative Sandbox. I thought my attempts were hilarious (and pretty terrifying), but when I showed them to a friend, she loved them so much I started to love them too. Sometimes it just takes one person to look at something and say that’s amazing for you to be like oh yeah. It kinda is. And it was those hilarious, imperfect, (but kinda amazing) kittens that had my back.
Just as with the blob, I drew the kittens over and over and wrote what came to mind: gang of supportive kittens….positive + imperfect.
When blob says OMG, you’re doing what? Ugh, the kittens say, Blob, I’m so tired of you. Shut up. And you know what? It helps.
That’s because getting it out of my head and onto the page helps. Naming what is helps, whether that is resistance or compassion, fear or support, seeing it in front of me helps me deal with it and move past it.
Drawing out the blob helped me see the critic isn’t Truth. It’s just fear. (Doesn’t it always come back to fear?)
It also inspired me to try an exercise from a book I’d picked up from the library called Craft-a-Doodle, where you draw a monster a day. I decided I would do it for the month of March and they would all be resistance monsters. Because fear is sneaky isn’t always a blob in a beret (side note: I have nothing against berets. I rocked a pretty awesome green one as a kid…I might (definitely) still own one).
I drew out 31 boxes (because containers help) and I decided that I would spend no more than a couple minutes drawing the monster each day. No over-thinking it, no expectations, no pre-planning. Just sit down, feel the resistance come up and put it on the page. I also decided to name what the resistance was each day (again, fear takes many forms).
Do you like the shadow of my phone? I’m in a coffee shop, so I have no control over the lighting. I could wait until I got home and re-do it, but I’m calling it good and moving on. Perfectionism be damned.
I’m only a few days into my March Monsters, but what’s come up has been revealing. From foggy sleep brain to anxiety and other people’s judgments (imagined, of course….as most fears are), to yesterday’s resistance in the form of envy. Naming the creative (and life) blocks has helped move them away from the front of my brain and made me better able to be compassionate with myself around what’s slowing me down and holding me back.
And for me right now, that’s the goal.
Awareness. Self-compassion. Moving forward to create.
