Reconnecting with our inner artist this August – The Skinny

Edinburgh in the summer always finds me having a weepy, doubting moment in the face of the many, many festivals. Every August, the city is overrun with artists and their audiences; acrobatics scaffold the Meadows, props crowd buses and pierced out-of-towners with DIY sound systems set up at my favourite Haymarket cafe. As a person who loves the arts and wants to ‘create’, it’s invigorating – but it also points me terrifyingly back to my own blocks. I feel this inadequacy often, but it’s during the Fringe that I feel the curtain slip most between the art-filled life I want and the numbed 9 to 5 life I live. 

I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time agonising over why I don’t feel the urge to ‘create’ anymore, and why when I sit down to try to produce something ‘creative’, I can’t. Probably everyone I know has had this feeling before, but it eats at me in an existential way. After a few breakdowns, I was determined to figure it out: how do I fulfil my long-time desire to be creative? I’m the type of person that Googles my feelings, and I’ve gotten to the bottom of the Internet. I knew that this Fringe, to protect myself from a fatal hit to my self-concept, I had to act. So, I put myself in some of Edinburgh’s existing creative communities to explore these questions.

I began with a life drawing class at Summerhall, led by Topaz. Entering the Anatomy Lecture Theatre, I bolted up the steps to the top-tiered row to ensure my paper couldn’t be peered over. I remembered the write-up for this class saying that people who have ‘absolutely no artistic abilities are especially welcome.’ If I were well-adjusted, I would simply be proud of my beginner status. But instead I sat there, clenched, remembering a day when I made someone laugh for three straight minutes at a Pictionary drawing.

It was a special session. This week, the model was posing in Shibari suspension ties. I arranged my charcoal and watched as the tying began. As the model was being bound over the chest, his head collapsed back onto the rigger’s shoulder, gentle and submissive – and I began to breathe. I worked on the poses, silent for nearly two hours as music played and the model rose into the air. Relaxed, and moving more freely, I reflected on stillness and attunement: what it takes to be with something, to respond rather than react from the societal scripts in our minds and bodies.

Bearing witness is a given right now – whether it’s to a friend’s pain, the everyday violence of this country’s systems, or the very present genocide in Gaza – but attunement isn’t. It takes slowness to actually sit with something, and any person under capitalism will have trouble with this. I realised that, in part, I’ve had trouble expressing meaningfully because I’ve had trouble existing in the world meaningfully. The first step towards a more creative life might, therefore, be a step into true presence and response.

Life drawing was more terrifying to me than therapeutic dance, the next class I took, led by Lauren McGonagle in North Merchiston. It may be more vulnerable, but I’ve never made someone laugh with my dancing. Each week is different, but this class was about resistance. Beginning with a free-association writing exercise about a part of myself I felt resistant to, I was led to move improvisationally. I wrote about my numbness: the culprit, I believe, of so much of my creative blockage. I’d already understood that my chronic numbness – of the Sad Girl variety – had given my lack of creativity its existential charge: if I’m not feeling anything, I must have nothing to express. What kind of a person has nothing to express?

But Lauren told me to make my numbness a movement; it was then that I realised my numbness was not absence, but an enormous presence. I began to duck my head, blunt my limbs at a bend and step heavily. My numbness took over all of me, an expression in itself. I thought about this creative nemesis differently afterwards. Maybe numbness, like many of our most hated feelings, cannot be expressed in words. Maybe it can only be embodied. It’s a start: an unsteady but definite expression. It means I am someone even when I feel like I’m not.

I’ve had other creative experiences in the past few weeks. I was creative when I made a playlist, when I cooked dinner for my lover and when I read tarot for my friends. I know, logically, that I am ‘creative’ every day, but these micro-expressions don’t feel enough when I stack them against the shiniest Fringe posters. 

These classes didn’t awaken my inner creative potential with the paradigm shift I wanted. They did, however, nudge my beliefs about creativity back into a malleable space. I was finally able to handle the very things that block me. They haven’t disappeared, but I can shape them now – and that act of shaping is, perhaps annoyingly, the most meaningful creative act. So, this festival season, I won’t be walking past the Meadows with some horrible existential longing. I’ll be walking to the places I’ve found in the cracks of the everyday, where we never fully achieve something – and that’s the good part.