When procrastination strikes….

I'm on something of a roll with the topic, and very concept, of creativity at the moment. 

I've made peace with the odd bout of children's TV (definitely a post for another time) and found some burgeoning confidence thanks to a great deal of personal growth, self-discovery and a fairly major breakthrough (yep, another one for another time).

I have committed to practicing creativity inside and outside of my scope as a mother. I'm here, I'm ready to go.

So today after lunch Cherry and Violet took some down-time with the Octonauts and I came into my study and turned on my computer, checked a few social feeds, responded to some blog comments and…

sat.

What now? I've given myself full permission to create. I have a billion and one things on my list including, but not limited to: a new book pitch; redesigning my blog; sewing new dresses for Cherry and Violet; creating a mood board for my study; reading the range of books and magazines I have lined up for a quiet moment; a feature for the Telegraph; a travelling notebook to read and contribute towards; and a daily journalling practice.

All systems go!

All systems stop. Enter procrastination.

A pointless loop of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, blogs, Twitter again, oh look what's this link abou- NO STOP. Just STOP.

I took myself downstairs and opened my journal. Ignoring the wreckage of my kitchen post-lunch I wrote down every single thought that was in my head. It was very illuminating. Here's some of what I was wrestling with.

I can't think of a blogpost idea!
I haven't heard back from my editor at the Telegraph regarding my latest pitch.
My book idea feels too big to even attempt to start.
I haven't got much time! I need to use it productively!
The house is a tip.
There are actual flies buzzing around the kitchen.
The garden needs watering. The trough needs replanting.
If that fabric had arrived I could start sewing. But it hasn't. Even though I have plenty of fabric to practice with and am very rusty with the machine, I'm still holding off for that new fabric.
There's so much laundry that needs doing.
The kitchen needs tidying.
The toys need sorting out completely.
I can't connect the printer to the computer because I don't have an ink cartridge. We probably shouldn't buy anything unnecessary until after Noel has been paid.
I don't want to waste my time reading books and magazines! I can do that later.
I don't want to waste time creating a mood or inspiration board! I can do that later. 
I don't have time to 'get into' Pinterest.
I don't have time to redesign my blog.
Should I be paying the children attention instead of letting them watch TV?
Octonauts is nearly over, I need to get back to it! 
What am I going to make for tea? 
Why don't I meal plan?!
Do I need two notebooks - one for journalling and one for creative brainstorming and ideas?
Don't forget the travelling notebook! And don't do that thing you always do and leave it until the last minute because you're looking forward to it and want to give it special time and attention that never materialises so you end up rushing and doing a really half-assed job!

I looked at what I had written and thought, no wonder I can't get going with all that swirling around up there. Especially as I am clearly creeping into frustration and beating myself up, which never leads anywhere good. I'm totally over making myself feel bad to make myself 'better'.

Since I learned to observe and detach a little from my thoughts, rather than blindly accepting them as whole truths and following them to the letter, I have begun to really appreciate how flawed and often jumbled my thought processes are. What does come through very strongly though is a complete fixation on productivity and outcome.

My main fears around creativity and general time spent outside of mothering involve 'wasting' time. I feel like I need a result, an outcome, some proof for every hour - every minute - spent not meeting the needs and demands of my children.

It's quite understandable, because having such short snatched pockets of time in which to do so many things does create pressure. Although truthfully I think I have always thought this way, been overly preoccupied with outcomes. Our social and education system is pretty outcome-obsessed.

Processes rarely get a look in, both inside my head and outside in the wider world. Which is such a shame because 95% of the joy in any project, and in fact life in general, is in my humble opinion in the process, the journey.

But that's not to say that everything in my head was nonsense. It certainly was an epic attack of procrastination but some of it was still relevant. Despite the popular rhetoric that 'the housework can wait' I find that often, actually, it can't. Not just because of the flies in the kitchen (I feel compelled to point out that everybody on our street gets invaded by flies in the summer, it's not just me!) but also because if my house is covered in crap and all the dishes are dirty and we have no clean clothes, I can't really mother to the best of my ability.

I'm too busy falling over Lego and boxes full of bags full of boxes whilst looking for a cup for one thirsty child and a pair of shorts for the other or more likely the same child who has tipped previously-proffered cup of water all over herself mentioning no names here Violet.

I'm no neat freak but I do find the more cluttered my house, the more cluttered my mind, so I try and stay on top of the day-to-day carnage.

Once I'd finished writing I thought, what needs to be done here?

I got up, lit some citronella and washed up. As I did so, I watched my thoughts drift past, like the bastard flies still determinedly buzzing around the remains of our lunches.

One or two seemed worth noting so I jotted them down in my notebook before carrying on.

By the time I'd finished, I had a clean kitchen and three blogposts already written in my head, all ready and waiting for me after I'd spent the rest of the afternoon with Cherry and Violet and put them to bed.

And you're reading one of them right now.

Thoughts on blogging lately

I have been thinking about just closing this blog down. I blog infrequently and quite erratically, I don't stick to linkys or projects, and its general existence bothers me as it feels half-assed and a very real and public reminder of my overall tendency to start things, not put in enough effort then sort of tail off and leave them unfinished.

*Exhales loudly*

I have concerns about privacy, I sort of want to write stuff and have nobody read it for fear they will take wild offence and comment saying I am a horrendous bitch BUT I also love it when people say they like what I have written or it has struck a chord with them. I worry about sharing too much, coming across as inauthentic and guarded OR messy and needy, and I worry about my daughters' privacy too.

I worry that all I do is write about and post pictures of my children and that all I am is a mother to my children. Then any time I think about what I might do outside of mothering I feel this enormous wave of certainty that at the moment this is my greatest work, and it deserves all of me for the short years in which it is so all-consuming.

I can't be the only one who has these mixed feelings about blogging (and mothering), so for now I have decided not to close it all down.

There aren't any real rules to blogging (well, none that I would pay attention to anyway) and that leaves me wide open. Which is one of the reasons I find it so hard.

I've been a writer my whole career, a journalist, an author, a copywriter and a creative. These are all very different forms of writing that require different skills, but what they do have in common is a requirement that I mask the 'me' in favour of the information, the facts or the message.

As I've been writing in this way, for money, for more than 10 years it's hard to unlearn these habits and let my own voice come through and write at length about me, me, me. The best I can do is write about my children and my feelings about being a mother but that's only a tiny part of the story.

But the blogs I love to read the most, and find the most inspiring, do exactly that. They tell the whole story. I do of course love reading about other people's children and looking at crafts, recipe ideas, photos, outfits, fitness updates, houses etc, but the posts I love the most are the personal ones, where you get an insight into the writers' real mind and real life.

That's truly inspiring. And seeing as I get so much from such bloggers, without their knowledge probably (must start commenting more) I feel I do want to give some of this back.

I read all the time, books on parenting and child development in particular but also around the wider area of personal growth. Being a parent feels to me the biggest opportunity for personal growth I have come across so far, and sometimes I feel I am raising three children, dragging parts of myself out of arrested development and into full adulthood. That seems to me to be a story worth telling even if I don't really know how to start, or how it ends.

Morning pages

If I were to do everything I wanted to do in the mornings, I would have to get up at about 2am. In an ideal world I'd get up, meditate, write morning pages, work out, do yoga, make a smoothie and sit down to breakfast with the children.

I'm sure it could all be achieved if I didn't spend 4-5.30am breastfeeding Violet who intermittently bellows MORE EAT! should I attempt to disengage her. She's a wakeful little thing in the early hours, so without me in bed, there would be no V in bed.

Then at about 5.30am Cherry comes and gets into bed with us all. Once in a blue moon she will fall asleep next to me, usually if Violet is already asleep and I can turn over and cuddle Cherry. But most of the time she wriggles about for a bit, whispers a few things then looms over Violet giggling, Violet's eyes ping open, and that's that.

We're morning people, people.

With two girls up and about from 5.30-6am Noel and I have plenty of time in the mornings before he leaves for work and I can usually fit in a workout and morning pages. I find these two the most important of the long list.

Meditation will have to wait, I can become an accomplished yogi another time, and I manage smoothies about four times a week.

Morning pages are the most powerful of all the morning tools in my humble opinion. I came across the concept reading The Artist's Way. The idea is simple. First thing in the morning, you sit down and you write three pages of longhand.

And then you go about your day.

You can write, literally, anything. Even if all you can think is 'I can't think of anything to write. What should I be writing? Am I doing this right?' You just write that, and keep writing. Even if you have three pages in which you have simply repeated 'I can't think of anything to write,' then you have done it 'right'.

Only you're highly unlikely to have three pages of 'I can't think of anything to write' as it turns out once you disengage your sceptical brain and simply spill the contents of your head onto a page, you have plenty to say for yourself.

All those worries, niggles, thoughts, arbitrary things that pop into your head. Down they go, onto the page.

It's really freeing to just sit and write in this way. I'm a writer by profession and that means initially I had to work hard not to over-write, just to convey thought from brain to page.

I find all sorts of things become clear through the morning pages. On a very practical level they are great for problem-solving. It's basically impossible to continue to complain about the same thing over and over again without identifying some form of solution, or at least acceptance. I also find them very powerful creatively. All kinds of ideas and plans come through the pen onto the page.

Taking the time to write three pages feels like something I can do to help take care of myself. I have been thinking more and more about the concept of self-care recently, as in what does self-care look like on a practical level? Unloading my mind in the morning definitely falls into the category of a very practical way looking after myself.

One of the most overwhelming aspects of having two very young children is the lack of freedom of thought. I have to work hard to stay in the present moment with my girls, as much as I love them, because I have always been very much a dreamer. Feet on the ground, head in the clouds, always.

Children can sense when you aren't present and they don't like it - well, mine don't. The demands of being a mother have stretched into the very roots of me. Thoughts cluster up and become crowded, knocking against each other like one of those awful corporate toys to be found on the desk of a high-flying business executive.

Spilling it all out on to a page, however jumbled the end result, creates space for my children. I feel safe, knowing that I haven't lost anything if I let go, that whatever it is that seemed so important is written down, waiting for my attention another time.

Funny, I've been a writer my whole life but am only just starting to discover the true power of the written word.

Bringing creativity into my life

This year I want to become more creative.

I became a journalist primarily because I loved and excelled at writing, but the role of a news journalist is really to channel the voices and opinions of others. There is very little room for actual creative expression.

(As an aside, I find blogging surprisingly difficult, because I spent ten years being very proficient at removing all trace of myself, my opinions and my creativity from my daily output.)

It's probably no coincidence that since cutting dramatically back on work, I have found myself wanting to become more creative. When I'm being paid to write reams of content for clients, I don't really want to spend what little free time I have writing.

Creativity isn't exactly limited to writing - by definition, it's limitless. I have picked out a few areas in which I would like to become more creative this year.

They are

Writing
Might as well start with the obvious! I want to work on different types of writing and as a start have chosen to commit to a journal, this blog, and letter-writing to my family in Singapore. I am pondering adding short stories to the list, but that's probably enough writing for now!

Photography
God I love photography. I am not very good at drawing, so I have carried around for years the belief that I'm not 'arty' or can't 'do' photography. In fact I've always loved the concept of photography and been quite drawn to it, but lacked the confidence to actually begin to learn anything in earnest because 'I'm not arty'. Although once I thought about it one of the things I love so much about photography is it allows you to create art without having to draw anything yourself!

My home
Since moving into a family home I have come to understand that home-making is a skill and an art. A home can be functional and beautiful. A home can reflect the individual and collective personality of the people living within it. As a lifelong member of Generation Rent, until now my house has basically been where I put my stuff. It's only now that I have the freedom to make the house we are fortunate enough to live in, a home.

Working out
If I could I'd ride my bike for hours and hours every day. Unfortunately I have years to wait before my children are at school and such an ambition is feasible. Most days I work out in the house and there's not much I can do about that, but I can make the space I work out in more creative. I can also be more creative with my workouts in general rather than going through the same tired old motions.

My children
V is still a little young for true 'crafting' but Cherry loves cutting and sticking and painting and anything involving masses of mess and things that V shouldn't but always does end up putting in her mouth. They can however both decorate the s**t out of a cake, and V's pretty good at 'drawing', if by 'drawing' you mean sitting in her chair saying PAPER while eating Cherry's crayons and throwing stuff on the floor.

Meditation
I'm intrigued by the concept of creative meditations and adding visuals and other tools to the practice.

Connections
At the end of last year I took an introduction to massage course, which I will blog about another day. I learned a lot about myself during the five-week duration as well as much about the way in which we make connections. Human connections are far more than just verbal and massage is an entirely unspoken but deeply powerful way of making and nurturing connections. I'm excited to explore this more this year.

That'll probably do for now. I would love to hear any tips or recommendations for good learning sources on any of the above - particularly photography, as that's really dominating the list at the moment.

Fiction and non-fiction

When people find out I am an author they get all excited and squeaky. 'So what do you write? Have I heard of you?!'

I instantly get squirmy. 'Oh, nothing exciting. Just non-fiction. Boring stuff. You won't have heard of any of it and I've hardly sold any….so what do YOU do?'

I know, I want to slap myself too.

My mystery conversationalist doesn't know that actually, I've always wanted to write a novel but I don't feel I'm quite ready yet. Or rather they probably do, because I'll tell them, apologetically, if they ask me if I've thought about fiction.

The way I present non-fiction you'd think it was some kind of inferior option. Writing for those who aren't (whispers) real writers.

The urge to write a novel has been plaguing me for as long as I remember. As a young girl I devoured all the children's and YA fiction, and even Mills & Boons, I could get my hands on. I'll see you a Sweet Valley High and I'll raise you a Saddle Club, The Silver Brumby, Phantom Horse, The Babysitters Club, The Black Stallion, anything by any of the Pullien-Thompsons, Mallory Towers, and Enter My Jungle to boot.

And I wrote too. Thrilling tales of girls and ponies, girls who wanted ponies but couldn't have them, girls who had ponies and went on adventures with them, exciting yarns about misdeeds uncovered by intrepid girls, the misdeeds inevitably involved ponies, you get the gist.

As I got older and added Jilly Cooper and her ilk to my reading list, I would throw a Handsome Man into my writings. He may or may not have been roughly based upon a combination of Liam Gallagher and Ronan Keating (criiiiinge). Our intrepid girl heroine usually stumbled - literally - across this weirdly handsome, inevitably Irish, rather rude ruffian while she was riding her pony, and they would have cross words, and off she'd gallop, fuming at his lack of manners.

But when she got home she'd find she couldn't stop thinking about him…and he about her, of course…and in the meantime, ponies...

A novel is in my future, of that I have no doubt. I have two drafts saved on my computer, both of which need A Lot Of Work. I flit between the two then have long, long periods of not attending to either. I have little creative and emotional energy at the moment for anything that doesn't involve my children. When this will change, I don't know. But I know I will know when I know.

I also haven't had the emotional energy to read much fiction lately. Or more pertinently, the time! But I have read a lot of non-fiction, and I can honestly say I love it as much as, if not more than, fiction.

I always have. One of my favourite things to do when I was younger was read non-fiction. I had a library card and boy did I know how to use it. Having read my way through every single pony book (and magazine) in the South East of England by the age of six, I turned my avid, greedy eyes to anything else I could get my mitts on.

On any given week I would check out of the library books on herbal remedies, yoga, cooking, gardening, beauty, makeup, music, dance, gymnastics, hair care, DIY, design, geography, art, photography, the natural world, reflexology and massage….

Healing, nature and animals certainly featured heavily but I would read almost anything. Once I checked out a book entitled How To Be A Supergirl which was like a pre-teen equivalent of How To Walk in High Heels by Camilla Morton. The ethos was wonderful, here was a practical guide to being capable, a lifestyle handbook dressed up as aspirational.

Another time a friend dared me to find a library book that had never been checked out (we knew how to live) and take it out. The Complete Guide To Beekeeping was duly brought home in my rucksack. I read it from cover to cover and within a year I'd been to beekeeping classes and had a hive kept in an orchard a mile up the road.

I rarely, if ever, delved into anything around politics, economics, history, popular culture and celebrities. If it was historical and involved ponies, it might make the list but other than that these were - and still are - pretty much black holes for me. I can't explain why, these just aren't areas that have ever lit a flame within me in the same way the natural world or, well, ponies did.

Today I still read non-fiction in a kind of frenzy, devouring it until the words are coming out of my ears. I've read so many parenting and child development books I could probably write a thesis. The consumption of parenting books in particular is surrounded by snobbery and finger-wagging and the myth that good parents don't need to read as they somehow automatically just know everything. I am 100% happy in my decision to read as much as I can about the development of the two people I have chosen to bring into the world. After all, reading about what I do, is what I do.

I'm still that girl with the bruised, battered library card. I'm sad that libraries no longer keep dated records of checkouts in the front of books because if I could, I'd find a book that had never been taken out of the library, and I'd take it home and read it to this day.

I don't even know if any libraries hold my books. If they do, they may well be the books that nobody's ever checked out. But some day somebody like me might. They might take home The Girl's Guide to Life on Two Wheels, laughing to themselves. 'Who needs a book about riding a bike?' And they might read it, and fall in love with the idea of getting a bike and riding to work, just as I fell in love with so many things through the medium of words, and if they did, that would be just lovely.

Pix of Cherry circa 16 months reading The Girl's Guide to Life on Two Wheels.