Creative Bootcamp: Day Five - Grow

Tonight I went through those songs that I used to listen to over and over again:  Ani DiFranco, Tori Amos, Grateful Dead, Pearl Jam, STP, Violent Femmes, Faith No More.  In those days, I didn't realize there was much of a future beyond getting up tomorrow.  I didn't think I'd go to college (they encouraged me to go the community college interview and we couldn't afford it).  I didn't think I'd have a long term-boyfriend much less a husband.  I remember drawing hippie flowers and hanging them up in my room, reading books on astrology and staying up late to watch Arsenio Hall and sneak out to smoke cigarettes.  I would stay up many late nights, playing the same CDs straight off my Columbia House catalog, daydreaming that I was someone different.

I have a boot camp confession to make:  For me, art making stirs stuff up.  I think I'm stirring stuff up.  I could feel it sorta growing in the background, and going through old music made me become incredibly aware of it.  Actually, the credit goes to a co-worker who pointed out that my neck pain may be related to feelings.  That's the problem with working in a mental health clinic:  we all call each other out on our feelings.  Boo. 

I put creativity last.  It lives in the secret dark place where I work hard to stuff my feelings into, shoved way in the back.  To dig in and get to creativity, some of those feelings are coming out too.  Wacky ones, like anger and hurt and some bittersweet memories that I am not sure I mourned properly.  I kept moving forward and moving forward, and stuffing and stuffing, and hoping it won't catch up to me.  When I was a teenager, I was so buried in feelings that I couldn't breathe, I had to do something with them just to move forward.  But here I am, and I guess its time to start sorting through them.  Oh crap, and feeling them. 

I couldn't help but wonder if others were having the same experience?

When I was a kid, my favorite book was the Secret Garden.  I simply loved when Mary shows Dickon the secret garden and he clears away dirt from the tiny buds shooting through the earth and proclaims, "they're wick!"   Maybe a little of what is happening here is a clearing away of dirt to learn that things are still alive and growing.  Maybe I'm at a place where I can grow my feelings safely without be choked.