Creative choices can carry a lot of emotional weight. Some of them are the pivotal, life-changing choices you remember because they highlight the ways you decided to honor your true self or turn away from what you really wanted to create in order to play it safe, avoid confrontation or out of sheer fear of success.
Creative choices are also easy to romanticize; to dig into and exploit the inherent emotional trigger points that allow you to celebrate or judge yourself over and over again.
I think the creative choices you didn’t make or somehow lost are the hardest to get over, the hardest to forgive yourself for, which can make them feel bigger than you and your ability to get over them.
In order to move towards a creative connection that feels natural, supportive and freeing you have to start by forgiving what you are unable to change – or wish you could – about your creative choices in life so far. It’s also the focus for this week’s Creativity Kick-Start theme: Forgiving yourself for creative choices you regret.
Understanding your True Creative Needs and How to Meet Them
It’s a story as old as time – you take a job for the money, the safety or just because you need a job. As you get rooted into the experience and creative desires fade, eclipsed by mundane work commitments, the voice of the boss or the overwhelming feeling your efforts don’t matter in the big scheme of things. Maybe your health starts going down the toilet and you struggle through another day doing what you feel you must, while your energy level is in the negative digits.
Welcome to the human experience we all have at some point – but you don’t have to get stuck in this box.
On some level everyone can relate to a version of this story, getting caught up in what was most important in the moment for survival and financial stability while your creative connection falls flat. Yet, when you realized your needs were no longer being met, maybe even trampled on, it isn’t always easy to leave and change your life in a flash. You need to meet a personal threshold of tolerance and be willing to change your situation to move past it.
And while we often move on to something better due to frustration or insurmountable challenges, the guilt or heavy-hearted feeling sticks with you. Thoughts like – if I only, if I just, if, if, if… and you still feel the emotion of it often years later. This continued connection to the negatives of an experience can impact current choices and how you see your creative capabilities moving forward. That’s why moving through the emotional grief of a past creative choice is so important for full healing and to create a healthier ground in the path ahead.
Forgiveness of Creative Choices Starts with Owning Them
Before I developed Creative Katrina I started out as an entrepreneur and writer through my business Buzzword Communications, LLC. While I was getting started I worked a part time job at Barnes and Noble and at the local Humane Society helping rehab wild animals and slowly began collecting local writing clients. I was doing well and working really hard but the gap between bills and income wasn’t quite cutting it.
So when a job opportunity with IBM came along through a friend, I took it. I was afraid I may never be able to make the financial traction I needed on my own, so I listened to what other people thought I should do before my own desires. This choice required me to give up all my current clients (my commitment to IBM was at least 50+ hours a week) and I had to work out of my bedroom because I was sharing a small town house with a roommate at the time. Oh, and I only had 48 hours to make my decision.
The minute I finally decided to say yes I had the strangest feeling come over me – sadness mixed with defeat, like my soul was leaving my body. Yet I stuck with my choice, giving it try by taking the safe road. After four years, a mounting pile of unexplainable health issues, zero creative impulse to do anything for myself and a general sadness that I couldn’t quite shake – I finally left. The positives – I made a lot of money, paid off debt, moved into my own place, bought a car and got great experience working online from home with people all over the world.
Reflecting on this creative choice, I could lament on all the things I missed out on creating or or experiencing. However, the biggest lesson for me was that I didn’t listen to myself. I didn’t make a creative choice that was right for me, I made the choice my parents were proud of and others thought was best.
So does that make it a bad choice? No. I think it was a great way to learn my own value and get financially stable, but who knows what would have happened if I said no, and gambled on myself all those years ago? That’s why the hardest part was forgiving myself for making that creative choice. And yes, every now and again, I still wonder the same thing we all wonder, “what if…” but I also know the true piece of wisdom I received from my choice.
When you feel like there’s a creative choice you’ve made that still haunts you, think again. Focus on what you learned and unlearned, understand it was all part of getting clearer about your true self and do your best to own it. Then you can move closer to forgiveness – one of the most powerful creative tools.
If you need a little extra support to move through the self-forgiveness process, I offer a variety of support services. Looking to do a little extra reading to tap into self-healing? Here are some of my other post blog posts that can help Change, Flashbacks and Getting Past your Back Story, Cutting Creative Baggage Loose, Is a Hidden Desire to Conform Keeping your Creative Fire Small?
Photo Credit: Derek Bruff, Show in my Eyes, Celestine Chua