Tag: creativity

Writing

Why do you write?

Mary C

This was one of the initial questions the writing Mastermind teacher asked us on our first Zoom encounter in early January. I looked at the squares of women, twenty-eight of us in all, embarking on this six month quest to devlop a non-fiction project we hoped to publish. I felt overwhelmed and wondered who I thought I was to embark on such a quest.

Why do I write? It started after my brother Jeff’s suicide when I was a freshman in college. A glorious new world of freedom was at my feet and I was now facing the biggest stumble of my life. Grief. Loss. Hopelessness. The only thing I could think to do was to write about it. My mom brought me to a therapist shortly after Jeff died but I was all clogged up, didn’t know how to speak out loud the things I was feeling, the dark thoughts rolling around in my head. Pen and notebook saved me. Denial did too.

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Life

Life in the messy middle

Mary C

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Sometimes I think of life as a sandwich with three layers. The bottom piece of bread is where you don’t want to do anything. Energy is lagging, you might be feeling like a cold is coming or you feel like getting through each day is enough of a struggle without trying to do much more than sustain yourself and family. You feel weighed down by the rest of the sandwich. The top layer of bread is where you are sitting above the fray. Energy is high. Things get done. And there’s not a lot of work involved. The middle is messy. It’s where you push yourself a little more. You don’t just show up to life but participate in it, making decisions, making an effort, letting yourself shine through your actions.

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productivity

Solving my productivity problems

Mary C

Productivity has been a buzz word for quite some time because I rarely meet someone who does not want to be more productive. I cannot resist clicking on any headline that has the words productivity or organization in them because I want to do better. I am a sucker for trying new things and have attempted online calendars, Outlook, pen and paper calendars, writing to do lists, etc, etc. I have yet to be successful at any of it. I have been toying with bullet journaling for some time but I fear that would require bringing a new notebook into my life. Plus, I don’t see myself as artistically creative like I see when I Google “bullet journal” and scroll through the images. I don’t think it’s so much the systems as it is my personal style of getting easily bored with these methods.

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