Keeping your creative passion in focus through routine and crisis! - Vanessa Napolitano
/Keeping your creative passion in focus through routine and crisis!
If I say balance and motherhood, I’d be invoking a struggle very familiar to mums. Balancing your child, and work. Fitting in exercise and some time to relax. Arranging school pick-ups around a wok day. Keeping things running around the house. Making sure you have time with your partner. All of this was challenging enough in the ‘olden days’ before we required the super power of balancing through a prolonged national crisis, without our existing support systems - often no schools, less help or no help from family, no soft-play, no play dates - at times, no playgrounds or outside space.
What’s not often mentioned in the ‘balancing’ equation is creative passions that might not be our day jobs. In my case I have a job that I love (working at a University supporting international students) and an almost five-year-old daughter who is absolutely central to my life. I also write poetry, which I have been doing since I was a child. It’s easy for me to prioritise being a mum and a wife, and my day job. Those are essential roles, and they cannot fall by the wayside, society validates the idea that these roles MUST be my priority. It’s easier for me to reduce my writing to a ‘hobby’ and something which can be dismissed when push comes to shove. When homeschooling comes in to play, or work is busy. When anxiety levels are high and time is crunched.
But this is a mistake. For me, and I think for other creative mums, the pursuit of writing (or art, or photography, or any other kind of creativity) needs to be given space and validity whether that’s in the face of an ongoing routine, or whether it’s during a crisis. Writing is a kind of work for me, and it’s also a passion. It’s difficult to describe how I feel when I am writing something which feels genuinely good (which is certainly not that often - lots of writing doesn’t meet that bar), but it’s a distinct feeling of satisfaction. My mental health is better when I write regularly, and I am pursuing something that makes me feel like ‘myself’. This isn’t selfish - it’s essential.
When you prioritise your creative passions even when there doesn’t seem to be enough hours in a day, you are also modelling to your children that creative activities matter and giving attention to their own passions is possible. It helps for me that my husband supports and respects the time I spend writing, but you have to be your own advocate - nobody will make you sit at your desk and pick up your pen /latop if you don’t!
So don’t think of your creative passion as a luxury or ‘just a hobby’ - regardless of whether your art is for others to see, or just for yourself. Whilst you shouldn’t beat yourself up if the lack of balance and space in the last year has taken away your energy and enthusiasm, try to prioritise your creative time by:
Talking about it to your family, and letting them know you want to spend time on it;
Setting a goal for how much time you can invest in a day, or a week;
Finding a group of like-minded creative friends (this could be a community on instagram - a whatsapp group, or even - eventually - an in person group)
If you do want to share your work, send it out! It’s incredibly rewarding to see your writing in print
Feel confident in saying you are a writer, or an artist, or a poet. If you write or make art, you are entitled to call yourself this!
Become aware of how you feel after you’ve allowed yourself time to focus on your creative passions
Set goals and deadlines for yourself if it helps you to stay accountable (I will join events like NaPoWriMo where you write a poem a day to motivate myself to be more productive)
Don’t minimise your creativity because it doesn’t have the same external pressures as your day jobs or your role as a mother. I know this is easier said than done on some days, and there have been months at a time, notably when I had a new baby, where I have stopped writing. However the more I allow the habit of writing to flourish, the more happiness I find it brings me.
I hope the same for you!
Bio:
Vanessa is a published poet (most recently in the Positive Wellbeing Zine for Mums and New Normal magazine) and works at a university with international students. She lives with her four-year-old daughter and husband in West Yorkshire.
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