what is your creativity trying to tell you?
listen to it, it might surprise you.
July is Bebe Moore Campbell Minority Mental Health Awareness Month, and this month, I want to use our time together to explore how our creativity plays a role in our mental health. Yes, as creative people, we can sometimes use our imaginations to fuel our fears and worries. Yet I do believe that our creativity is a power - one that if we use with intention and discernment, can save us and others from the internal struggles that we all face.
Last month, I got the fulfilling opportunity to serve as the community manager for the #1000WordsofSummer project hosted by author Jami Attenberg via her newsletter
. It’s a writing project during the summer where every day Jami and/or another published author will send out an encouraging letter and you commit to writing at least 1,000 words towards whatever writing project you desire.This was my second year as community manager but my first year committing to hitting the daily word count. Long before the Internet, my original dream was to be a writer, an author to be specific, and I’ve tucked that dream away for a long list of reasons. But this time around, I wanted to give it a shot. There was no way I could sit back and encourage over 7,000 writers to write and I wasn’t doing the same.
So I wrote every day in that two week time span, some days I wasn’t with it, some days I was but I focused on simply just writing for the sake of writing. By the end of the two weeks, I had over 14,000 words and I was equal parts shocked and genuinely surprised at how good that felt.
It then clicked: I could think about writing, dream about it, read about it, watch YT videos about it, save tips and tricks and reels but NONE of it was real without the actual act of writing. My desire to be an author wasn’t gonna happen just because I wanted it, the practice of showing up to write every day showed me that my active and actual participation was necessary for momentum to be created. Sometimes we get so invested in our desires themselves, that we lose sight of what’s available on the way to getting what we want. Nothing works without putting in some form of work.
As we enter into a new month, I hope you get to realize what your core action is - whether that’s writing, mapping out plans, studying, reading, painting, scanning, sketching, coding, playing, etc - and you come back to that center when things are insane.
I’m in between jobs at the moment, I’m not even sure what I’ll be doing this month, let alone for the rest of the year. I am literally writing to you from a place of uncertainty that I sit with every single day. But that practice of writing, has solidified for me, that I still want to write. That my dream wasn’t lost, it was just waiting on me to uncover with the simplest of actions. I may not know much but writing is the thing I know for sure and that’s enough for me to stay grounded, even when things are hard.
I hope you find what your core creative action is, so that you can return to it when this world gets crazy, because we know it will.
Stay the course and take care of yourself and your creativity,
Melissa
In 2008, inspired by writer Bebe Moore Campbell’s charge to end stigma and provide mental health support for minority communities, the U.S. House of Representatives designated July as Bebe Moore Campbell National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month. Learn more about it here.
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Love this!! So proud of you!