I want to talk about a pattern in my life that’s been unfolding over the past several years — a pattern I’ve only recently become aware of. Slowly (so slowly I didn’t notice!) I’ve been making the shift from consumer to producer.

I started this blog more than a year ago and, at the time, I thought I would start writing again. I thought I would start writing regularly (I imagined myself writing poetry and stories, not essays) and publishing those stories and poems on my blog.

But it didn’t work out that way.

I do write regularly these days, but the blog post I publish each week are nothing like the creative pieces I had initially imagined.

Instead, my blog drifted from poetry and stories to essays and my creative writing practice (although it has experienced periods of productivity) has, more often than not, floundered.

Creativity and building a creative writing practice is a subject I’ve devoted any number of blog posts to, and yet it’s still not a code I feel I’ve cracked.

I feel like I know all the things to do creatively and yet I never actually do them.

In other words, I often feel like a creative failure.

And yet, there’s a thought that’s been percolating in the back of my head for the past couple of weeks — a thought about making the shift from consumer to producer.

What exactly do I mean when I say “the shift from consumer to producer”?

Increasingly I am convinced that creativity happens in the margins, in the pauses and the white space we build into our lives. And in today’s hyper-connected, always “on” culture — consciously cultivating white space is getting harder and harder.

And I’m not just talking about the seven TV shows you follow religiously (my number back in the day).

There’s actually two different kinds of consumption:

1. There’s the physical, tangible stuff we consume — the news articles, the blog posts, the podcasts, the TV shows, the books, etc.
2. But there’s also the intangible stuff — the stuff we don’t so much buy as buy in to. These things are the stories we tell about what people are supposed to do, who a person is supposed to be, what daily practices and habits a person is supposed to cultivate.

In my experience, it’s this second kind of consumption that’s most toxic to creativity.

For every bad habit of tangible consumption I’ve cut out (the food blogs with recipes I never cooked, the health blogs that left me feeling more anxious than I started, the writing blogs that reminded me daily that I wasn’t writing enough, the hours of TV I used to numb myself on weekends so that I didn’t have to feel my own discontent), I’ve bought into a half-dozen new stories about how TV is a waste of my time and how my writing practice should be a perfect expression of my creative soul and how my cooking is too utilitarian and my recipes should always be effortlessly delicious and look like art.

My inner perfectionist dive bombs into these stories about the perfect person I’m supposed to be — and the subsequent guilt of not living up to my own expectations entirely zaps my creative energy.

My white space is still filled… just not with physical clutter so much as clutter of a different, more poisonous kind.

And I believe that in order to develop a sustainable creative practice you have to throw out *all* the clutter, in all of it’s various forms.

Creative brilliance begins in the blank moments and the empty spaces when you’re caught adrift somewhere between existence and boredom.

Whether your clutter is physical or mental, the end result is always the same: you’re busy filling in the blank stretches of your mental space.

And without that empty space there’s never going to be room for something new and beautiful to grow.

I’d love for this to be a conversation and not a monologue! Are you interested in making the shift from consumer to producer? Which kind of consumption do you struggle with more, the tangible or the intangible? Let me know in the comments below.

How are you living your “one wild and precious life” (to quote Mary Oliver)? Do you struggle to do the things you want to do? Do you feel like you’re four steps behind where you want to be? Do you feel like you work and work and work but that your work never gets you anywhere you want to be?

This is exactly how I have felt for the past two or three years. Ever since I graduated from college I’ve been stuck in a rut that I know isn’t where I want to be, but from which I seem unable to free myself. It was a state of affairs that left me feeling frustrated and baffled and kept me from living my best life. Until recently, that is, when I read this article by Martha Beck, in which she writes:

“As every life coach knows, the way we do anything is the way we do everything. The same thoughts… torture me when I’m writing, emailing, even sleeping. I should be going faster, getting somewhere. I should have more to show for this. I shouldn’t have to double back, to revisit old emotional issues, to wipe the same damn kitchen counter every day. These thoughts burble along just under the surface of my consciousness every day. They make me slightly anxious—okay, some days irrationally terrified—and lend a driven quality to moments when I could be relaxed and present.” [[Emphasis mine.]]

And, you guys, it was like a thunderclap in my head as, with a whooshing sound, I realized something incredibly profound:

I do everything in my life with resistance.

Every single thing I do I treat as though it’s a struggle. Getting out of bed in the morning is a drag. Making my lunch is a drag. My day job — a double drag.

By the time I get home at night I’m so tired from dragging myself around all day that the things I actually wanted to do with my evening turn out to be… you guessed it, a drag!

Because my chosen after work activities (like my writing!) felt like a drag, I would often avoid them. And then I would feel terrible guilt for having avoided doing the things I was “supposed to” do. (Even if they only person who had decided I was “supposed to” do them was myself.)

But what if it didn’t have to be like that?

What if your life could be effortless and joyful instead of a drag?

What if you could make your life effortless simply by choosing to stop resisting what is? These questions have been plaguing me for the better part of a week  — and I have to tell you, the results so far have been nothing short of amazing. Already my life feels lighter and more joyful. Already I am beginning to find space to breathe for what seems like the first time in years (decades even).

I’m finding myself sitting down to happily do tasks that I have resisted for years. Suddenly my writing practice, which I have struggled to grow into anything robust, feels almost effortless.

I used to fall into a trap where I knew I wanted to write, at least in theory. But whenever I had the time to write I would find myself doing something else — anything else.

If you find yourself struggling to achieve your goals, I invite you to ask yourself this question:

What are you really resisting?

Because what I now realize is that I was resisting becoming the person I really want to be.

Somewhere deep down in my lizard-brain I was still struggling to hold onto my vision of myself as I am/was: the good student, the scientist, the professional. I wasn’t allowing myself to set aside those old dreams in order to step fully into the person I am interested in becoming: the adventurer, the poet, the writer.

So if your dreams seem continually out of reach, or you’re always struggling but never really satisfied with your success, I invite you to question what it is you’re actually struggling against.

Because if you are like me, you might just find that you’ve been struggling against yourself.

And the only thing I know for sure is that that is a battle we’ll never manage to win.

I’d love to hear from you! What are you struggling with in your life? What seems to be holding you back? What is it that keeps getting in your way?

Let me know in the comments below!