This is a picture of a couple of watercolor paintings I did some time ago. I miss it.
Let me tell you a story.
Making art was an important part of my healing and reconstruction process.
I didn’t know this at the beginning of my deconstruction. It didn’t know this consciously after I’d left the ministry and the church. In fact, it wasn’t until I published my new book, The Liberation of Sophia, that I realized making art helped save me.
It was the week after I left the church when I drew my first Sophia drawing. The one with the bear. The inspiration to draw her was unstoppable.
It was four years later when I drew my last one. The inspiration to draw her stopped.
It was when it stopped that I realized it was probably important that I did it. Drawing Sophia every week and writing about her journey was, I concluded, a crucial part of my healing.
It’s strange, but when I stopped drawing Sophia, I also stopped painting. I haven’t done a new piece in quite a while.
I draw my cartoons every day. I enjoy it. It’s creative. But it’s my work.
Being creative just for creativity’s sake! I need to get disciplined in that again. And I’m going to advise people when they are going through deconstruction to be creative and discipline themselves to be creative every day.
Why?
Because now I realize that creating things does something positive for us:
- It gives us some happiness because even while we are crashing and our world is crashing around us, that we can still create something.
- It inspires us that even though we might feel ugly in an ugly world, there are still remarkable things of beauty to be enjoyed.
- It empowers us to know that even while everything seems to be trying to stop us, we will still give birth to new and wonderful things.
So, here’s our exercise:
I believe everyone is a creator. Everyone is an artist. What are you making? What can you make? A painting? A dance? A poem? A journal entry? A blog post? A perfect medium rare steak? An awesome daily Facebook update? A flower arrangement? An urn? A sound of a crow? A computer code? Anything!
I’d love to hear, see, and know what kind of things you guys are creating.