How to deal with being stuck

Have you ever felt stuck in a rut? Like you had so many visions of what you wanted to do, but when you started doing them, it felt like everything you produced was a failure? It looked nothing like you imagined, almost like you had lost the magic touch from your hands. That’s how I’ve been feeling for the last month or so.

For a long time, I would sit there consistently every day practicing my drawing and painting, and it felt natural and easy.

Then it stopped.

I got scared.

I had grand visions of selling my artwork, I created a store. But no one bought anything (except for one special person). I started to fear that no one actually cared about anything I produced, it wasn’t good enough to sell.

Why was I doing this?

What was the purpose of it all?

These are the actions I took to get out of my rut and move forward. Hopefully, they will help you too.

Meditation

I took some time to meditate on the feeling of feeling stuck, accepting the emotion, and enjoying the parts of my life which were moving forward. An article on Tiny Buddha delves into this more deeply, if you are interested in how to do this.

Meditation helped me release the expectation that I should always be moving forward or making progress. It made me realize that it is okay to take breaks and have seasons of life where you make less progress. Just as each year, we have winter, spring, summer, and fall, we also have times in our lives where we have more energy and other times where we need to hibernate.

Continue to show up

Showing up even when things aren’t easy or you don’t know the answer is part of the process. Trust the Process delves into the notion that sometimes the creative process can be difficult – but being lost is actually a very important part of it. Shaun McNiff says it best – “When we are constantly keeping ourselves from falling and shielding ourselves from experiences, we exert tremendous energy in controlling our environments and defending ourselves from imagined threats. Falling becomes a release, an immersion in the process of life. Trusting the process brings a realization that miscues, mistakes, and failures make important contributions to the creative process.”

Part of the reason I was stuck was that I was afraid of not producing art that was perfect or of the caliber that people expected of me. When I tried to make something, it felt like it wasn’t good enough to share with others and it fed into my own insecurities of being a mediocre artist. However, this book helped me realize that those insecurities are also part of the creative process. We have to be willing to rework our original ideas in order to complete our projects.

Concentrate on the process

In Keep Going, Austin Kleon, a person with vastly more years of experience than me made a whole book to guide himself out of getting stuck. I think one of the most important lessons I took away from it was that it’s better to concentrate on your system for doing things than what you produce. His words really hit home when he says, “The creative life is not linear. It’s not a straight line from point A to point B. It’s more like a loop, or a spiral, in which you keep coming back to a new starting point after every project. No matter how successful you get, no matter what level of achievement you reach, you will never really “arrive.” Other than death, there is no finish line or retirement for the creative person.”

Those words helped me to reframe my feelings of stuckness. I felt I should be at a certain destination by now – but his words reinforced that there will never be a point of “arrival.” That point in time does not really exist, instead, the process of creation is the only thing that really exists – and it is the only thing I should focus my attention on.

In the end, dear reader, my main takeaway from doing these things was that I should go easy on myself – I don’t have to have all the answers – I just have to hang in there. And I hope, this will be your takeaway too.