Three Sides of the Corona Coin for Creatives

Are you feeling the pressure to write your King Lear before Phase 3 gets you back to your regularly scheduled life?  Me too. There are two sides of the Corona coin that the creatives in my life are struggling with right now.  The A side is use this time to create your masterpiece.  The B side is lean in and hibernate.  The tension between the two is growing as we go into phased openings. 

These three quotes can help unravel this tension right now.

1. “Writing is not a performance — it’s a service.” Donald Miller

When Donald Miller said this in a pandemic instagram video, I was struck. I had to re-think my approach to my writing project. As an actor, my performing life was marked by the idea that our work as actors was being there to serve the audience. At the time, this was a novel approach to make your audience the star of the show. I learned from Bernelle Hansen in our storytelling shows at Disney World to love the audience and serve them.  Meet them where they are at.  

There are writing projects that I’ve been slogging away at over the past year and now sheltered at home I have carved out more time, more space for writing. I built timelines that have me finishing in June rather than December. That isn’t what I needed. I need to remember that my work is not a performance. What really keeps me going is that thought: Serve the audience.  

There were many times in my daily performing life that I prayed for the audience, prayed for the individual I was going to pick from the crowd to be in the show.  Giving someone the stage is a powerful thing. Keeping the focus that creative work is an offering helps me to keep on those timelines, even when I feel overwhelmed.  Which brings me to my next point.  

2. It’s okay to not be at your most productive during an f’ing global pandemic 

I have no idea who created this lovely graphic meme but my life coach Elizabeth sent it to me.  And I love her for that. 

One of my creative colleagues is almost bullying me with the demand to produce work, “This is the time to create your masterpiece.  Keep going. You must!”  

Except that I’m in the middle of an f’ing global pandemic. I’m sure you’ve read about our survivor brains.  We are conserving energy to survive.  The uncertainty is an attack on me — driving me to hoard resources. Then I get hopeless and feel like this will never change. My system is crying out to shut down until this winter of our discontent is over and we can emerge in a spring.

As much as I want to create and am creating, I also need to back off — definitely drop the pressure to create something brilliant. The King Lear thing needs to stop. The story that the Bard penned his greatest work during the plague got lots of play in the first few days of this plague. Here’s some news — I wasn’t Shakespeare before the pandemic and I won’t be as a result of hiding in my house with a ream of toilet paper from Costco.  

This isn’t the Iditarod. I will not freeze and die on this journey if I lay down and take a nap. It’s ok. We will get through this and we will have created during it and after it.  Because that’s what we do. 

3. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? Isaiah 43:19

The Lord G-D Himself said to the prophet Isaiah during a time of exile that He was doing an new thing. Then things didn’t seem to change so much for a couple hundred years. 

I want something to be produced out of this time.  Like most creative projects, it will spring up. Do I not perceive it? I hope to be present and aware enough to perceive the good and the new that grows from this time.

The best thing to do during this global f’ing pandemic is churn good soil for something new to spring up. I am resting when spiritual and mental exhaustion hit me. I am writing every day — some of it good and some of it for the bin but it is a pleasure to write.  I hope that when I look up from my desk in July I will see work that can serve the audience. It won’t be King Lear. Probably Shakespeare didn’t know it was King Lear when he was scribbling away locked in his home with no hand soap and no internet access.  It was just what he was doing with his time.