FIND YOUR CREATIVE HEART

Dear Creative Friend,

I'd like to tell you a story about how this new course was born.

Sometime last year, sitting in a cafe in North London with my brother and my sister and my sister's best friend, I was struck all of a sudden by a physical bolt from the blue.

"Gosh I feel dizzy," I murmured.

No-one took much notice, it wasn't a big thing.

But when I tried to get up from the table half an hour later and walk from the cafe to the bus stop to get to the train home, I discovered that I couldn't walk in a straight line.

Literally.

It was funny at first. We were laughing, because I was lolling all over the place like a drunk, and I had to be held up by my sister and her best friend.

It quickly got worse.

They piled me onto a bus, and I held on for dear life until we reached the train station. By that time I felt so strange that I knew getting home wasn't going to be a simple matter of getting onto the train.

I reeled into the big pharmacy store in the station, made it to one of their pharmacy chairs and sat down.

It was a good half hour before I could stand up again.

I called my love.

"Just to say I'm not very well," I said. "In case something happens on the train..."

I spent the journey with my head in my hands, because seeing the countryside go by outside the window made the dizziness even worse.

At my home station I staggered off the train to make the long, three minute walk home, clinging onto walls and railings as I went.

A woman who had seen me struggling came over and asked if I was all right.

"No, I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m not drunk. But I can't walk in a straight line."

As the universe goes, she was an off-duty nurse.

"Come on," she said, "I'll help you home." Which she duly did, holding me close to her good warm self as we made our strange slow journey up the hill.

I know now that she thought I was having a stroke. But after all her tests proved inconclusive, she told me she was calling an ambulance and my husband, in that order.

So we went to hospital, and they did all the tests too, more tests than I care to remember.

And you know what?

Every single one of them came back normal.

No-one could tell me why I couldn't walk in a straight line.

Slowly slowly, over the next weeks and months, I returned to myself, and understood that something more had happened that day than a bit of anxiety (which was what they eventually put on my notes).

I realised that I was literally out of balance with everything I held dear, and because I wasn't listening my body chose to give me a push, and to keep pushing until I listened up.

Sometimes our better selves do that. Sometimes they tell us things that our busy, overwhelmed selves can't hear.

What I know now is that my better, no, my best creative self was calling, giving me a push to pay attention to all those things I once held so dear but which all the failures and stresses and griefs of recent years had all but taken from me.

And suddenly, because of that dizzying bolt from the blue, because of not being able to walk in a straight line anymore, I realised what I needed to do.

I needed to get my balance back.

I am a creative person. I live on the creative shore. I don't function well any other way.

When I said these things out loud again instead of apologising for them, life began to get a whole lot better.

And I started to take my creative ideas seriously, which is what happens when you stand up for your inner artist. That was when the idea for my new blog Your Best Creative Self came to me, to encourage others to embrace their creative journey just as I am finally embracing mine.

From the blog idea came the course idea, and in fact I became so taken with this course that I decided to give all my energies to that first.

And so here it is, bold as brass, waiting to be taken by others needing to get their creative equilibrium back too.

I wish your best creative self well, and dearly hope that you will be one of them.

29 April 2018