Time, Shame & the Shape of a Creative Life
tickets to shame and spiral time workshops are almost sold out!
In the coming weeks I am offering two of my most popular workshops, Neuroqueering Shame in Your Creative Practice and Creating in Spiral Time. Tickets are going fast and it looks like we will sell out, so if you are hoping to snag one, don’t wait! See below for more info.
Yesterday I taught the latest iteration of my Spiral Time workshop to the Neuroqueerdos (members of Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice), and in the process of putting it together, I stumbled upon a new metaphor, which is really resonating for me.
In this workshop we look at several metaphors for time that I refer to collectively as “Spiral Time”—there’s an elliptical orbit in space, and several tree metaphors. All are meant to help neurodivergent creatives disrupt shame around their creative practices—why does it take me so long to finish anything? Why do I abandon projects so often? Why am I so easily distracted? Why do I get lost down rabbit holes? Why have I wasted so much of my life? Oh how I wish I could get back all of that lost time.
The creative care practice in this workshop invited people to use various media to make connections across time among a lifetime of creative endeavors, special interests, and hobbies—whether long abandoned, or their latest passion. Looking for patterns and connections—as neurodivergent people are so good at!—it’s possible to pull strings through, seeing the ways that everything you’ve ever done is part and parcel of everything you are doing now, and everything you will ever do.
When I did the exercise myself ahead, as preparation, what emerged was an elaborate web, which helped me to see that so much of my creative life that now feels abandoned and shameful is actually still alive today in everything I do, even if I don’t have a book, or an exhibition, or a respectable professional career to show for it.
As I literally stitched this web with embroidery floss in multimedia paper, it came to me that maybe the web itself is the point. Not the book, or the piece of great art, or the career. The making, not the made. That the shape of my creative life is much like a spider’s web, a creation I have always found beautiful and miraculous. Maybe that web is what will remain, when everything else is inevitably forgotten or destroyed.
If you would like to dig a bit deeper into these themes of shame and time in your creative life, I am offering my two most popular workshops over the next two Sundays, 18 May (shame) and 25 May (spiral time) both at noon EDT. These workshops are about examining Western constructs of time, what I call “compulsory executive function,” the ways shame disables us (especially in our creative lives), and alternative metaphors and paradigms that might serve us better as neurodivergent creatives. Both workshops will include a presentation, a creative care invitation, and possibly time for discussion.