When Inspiration Meets Reality

I want to talk about the creative process.

When you have an idea, there’s that excitement, novelty and expansiveness as the inspiration comes down from the ether and tries to filter into your dense human body.

Then, as you start working on the project and bringing it into physical reality — which is a lot more slow-vibrating than inspiration — it starts to become complex. The limitations of the world get in the way. And the human mind.

We go from novelty and simplicity to something convoluted and complex when we’re bringing it into form. We start to get overwhelmed, and the idea we’re working on isn’t new or exciting anymore.

The Part Where We Want to Give Up

This is when most people want to give up and abandon their projects. It’s that part when you see those diagrams of the creative process being a big tangled mess. This is the messy part where you ask yourself: Is what I’m doing any good? Is it worth making? Should I just give up? Was I an idiot to think I could do something this good?

When an idea is in the ether, it’s so pure and new. But when it comes into the real world, it vibrates lower, becomes more complicated, and not as shiny or joyful or light.

A Baby Being Born

When coming from the ether into human form, things have to be made slow, vibrating, and dense — much like a baby. When human life is created, the animation of the spirit goes into the physical body. And when the baby leaves the comfort of the womb — a liminal space between ether and earth — the body has to learn how to operate in this world where there’s light, cold, heat, hunger, thirst and tiredness, with no way to communicate these needs. Suddenly we’re slaves to bodily limits.

I think that’s what happens with an idea. It comes from this pure form and has to exist in this imperfect reality.

The idea is never as pure as you first envision it, because it just can’t be manifested in that idealized state we feel in our imagination: otherworldly, dreamlike, electrifying and with a lightning-like quality.

The Meaningful Tension

The challenge is a good challenge. There’s tension in every good story, in drama, even in sewing — you need tension. We can’t create something without it.

When you’re stuck, the best thing to do is take a break and let yourself have a breather. You’re probably mulling over it in your subconscious anyway. Even though this tension is frustrating and annoying, it’s actually a really fulfilling type of tension — because you’re making something meaningful.

After a break and a mull-over, you come back with a clear head and (hopefully) a more discerning eye. Try to work out where it’s not working and what needs to change. This phase is not as exciting as the initial idea, because you’re looking at your creative project with an editing eye rather than that inspiration-fueled state. Now you have to problem-solve. But again, that tension is meaningful and paramount to creating the finished work.

Listening to Where the Work Wants to Go

The creative process is about listening to where the work wants to go. Sometimes it deviates from your initial idea. You have to be in a symbiotic relationship between you and the work, and surrender to the fact that it’s not going to come out exactly how you imagined it.

Most artists or creatives or writers would say their work isn’t perfect — there are things they couldn’t quite get right, things they’d want to edit forever. But at some point, you just feel the work is done. It becomes good enough, because you need to put it into the world. Otherwise it stays on your shelf, your art studio, your laptop or in your journal forever, and no one gets to see it.

This inaction takes away the gift of sharing it with others — and the transformative gift of what sharing does to you as a person.

Letting Your Work Go

When you have kids, they say you don’t own your children. At some point, you let them go. They find their own way, their own gifts.

It’s the same with a creative project. Letting go and letting the creative piece be what it needs to be in the world, trusting that even if it’s not perfect, it feels ready to go. It can then become its own entity, come into contact with others and inspire people to have their own ideas and revelations.

If you keep it locked up for fear of criticism, failure or someone stealing your ideas, you don’t just take away the benefit of sharing with others — you take away the benefit of what you get from sharing.

A Message to Myself

I’m actually saying all this to myself, because as a really creative person I’ve struggled with finishing things and putting them out into the world. I’ve also had this idea that when I share something, it needs to be received a certain way.

Social media and our fast-paced culture make everything feel like it has to be done quickly and successfully — because we’re always seeing everyone else’s highlight reels. But what we don’t see is all the times people failed, because they’re probably not sharing that.

We’ve got this skewed idea of what should happen when we release our creativity into the world, expecting it to be instantaneous. It’s not. It’s a slow meandering path of small steps creating a long journey.

The Reward Is the Process

The reward is the creative process itself, not the accolades or validation — which social media has skewed. Everything in this culture is instant gratification. Any movie, any song, any meal — all at your fingertips. There’s nothing slow anymore, unless you intentionally choose it to be.

While inspiration can be fast, the act of cultivating creative projects and a creative life is slow.

So this is a message to make sense of the creative process for myself (and others) and to bring a more realistic perspective to what it means to create work in this fast-paced world.

Taking Control Back

I’m trying to separate the creative process from the instant-gratification, validation-seeking models that social media and technology have built. It’s skewed my brain.

So how can I take control back?

By being aware of it. By sharing my ideas about it. By letting go of what happens when I share them.

I share my work because I think it’s worth sharing. I work on my work because it’s worth doing — not only for the end result, but for the creative tension that gives my life meaning and purpose.

In a world where you can lose your whole day on Netflix or Instagram, how can we come back to doing meaningful things that reset our dopamine receptors? Social media is junk food. We all want to eat it sometimes, but it’s not good every day. Just like our bodies, our minds can get obese when we’re consuming all the time instead of creating.

So here’s what I’m choosing:
the slow, messy, meaningful work of making things.
The tension.
The uncertainty.
The imperfect finished pieces that I’ll release into the world anyway.

Because endless consumption, endless scrolling, and keeping everything to myself - that’s not living and that’s not creating.
That’s just getting fat on other people’s ideas.

I found an old journal.

It was from around 2017, a time when I was in a big creative surge. I was studying Transpersonal Art Therapy and doing a lot of internal work and deep questioning. I remember feeling so alive and connected to something so profound and wise, even if it felt hard to explain in words or bring fully into this dense physical world.

I’d frantically scribbled down thoughts with a pink pen.

I called it “The Magic Container Theory.”

Here are some excerpts from those pages:

The Container of Experience
Without a container, we couldn’t experience anything. It wouldn’t slow down to be contained for long enough for our brains to comprehend.

No container = no experience. Just annihilation.

Containers hold things in time.

Without them, even our food wouldn’t last in the fridge — it would decay.

Containers make things last longer. They hold space.

Note:
No parameters.
No mundane.
NO MAGIC.

But even containers don’t last forever.

The mundane is the box we live in; our bodies, our schedules, the daily rhythms of washing, cooking, dishes. The everyday, over and over again.

Inside that box is us. Pushing up against the edges. Struggling, questioning, searching, doing, failing, doing again. That friction, that resistance, it’s where the life force gathers. It’s where the cracks start to form. And through those cracks? The magic seeps in.

The mundane is like the parameters on a school art project. Without them, there’s nothing to push up against. Nothing to rebel against, to stretch into, to grow from. No discovery.

It’s the struggle that gives us our victory.

It’s the tension that creates the breakthrough.

We live in a world of paradoxes disguised in physical life. The human experience is built on dualities.

You seek to find, but in the seeking you find yourself.

A guide can’t give you straight answers…it’s only a guide.
Your answers arise in your seeking.

Motherhood gave me a whole new set of limitations to push against. And strangely, they’ve sparked more creative focus than I had before.

Before my daughter, I had so much time, but I often squandered it. I lacked structure, discipline, and self-belief. I had to really push myself to create at home alone. I’ve started and paused a Fine Arts degree twice — once for Covid, and again when I got pregnant and was flattened by the morning all day sickness. I know I thrive with external structure: the momentum of deadlines, the buzz of being around creative people, learning new ideas.

But I always struggled with the academic lens of contemporary art, where everything is intellectualised to the point of needing to look up every second word. That kind of art world doesn’t always welcome emotion. And yet, for me, feeling is the foundation of art. It’s where the healing lives.

So, coming across this old journal, this little Book of Magic, reminded me to use my limitations as a catalyst for transformation…not resist them.

At the moment Motherhood doesn’t allow for long uninterrupted hours in the studio. I don’t have a dedicated space inside, just a plastic trestle table on the patio. Weather and setup make painting tricky. But I’m starting to adapt. I think part of me adopting a writing practice is the ease of which I can pick it up and put it down so easily. I can voice record while driving to pick up my daughter from daycare. Monologuing seems to unlock the same kind of creative flow you'd find in an inspiring conversation with a friend. I can type notes on my phone before my daughter tries to grab it off me. Writing feels like a conversation, like something I can pick up and put down easily, but still stay in flow.

This limitation has led me down a different creative path than I expected. And I’m surprised by how satisfying and meaningful it feels.

So now I’m wondering:

How can I keep pushing up against these edges, the tiredness, the broken sleep, the lack of space and time in a way that lets the magic seep in?

To help me work within my creative limitations I’ve sought out some creative accountability buddies. Each week, we set goals and check in to see how we’ve gone and if we haven’t met them, we recommit. It’s working well with my preference for external deadlines, and it’s something I’d love to facilitate in person one day when I have more capacity.

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So it brings me to ask the same question of you…?

What limitations in your life might actually be shaping a creative path you haven’t seen yet?

What might happen if you treated them not as limitations, but as creative catalysts inviting you to step into a portal on new journey?

But as a lifelong artist, I’ve never felt less creative than I have since becoming a mother.

Lack of sleep, energy, and autonomy leaves little room for painting or even thinking creatively. And yet, without using my mind and hands to make something, I don’t feel like myself. Inspiration has always been what keeps me feeling alive and connected. Without it, I lose my sense of self and after these first years of motherhood, I know I need to consciously cultivate it again.

Motherhood has brought up so many unresolved emotions and issues for me, and I’m writing this piece to reflect on how these challenges as a mother echo my struggles as an artist; particularly around perfectionism, failure, and the need to control what can’t be controlled.

The Fear of Failure and the Cage of Perfectionism

Breastfeeding was incredibly hard for me. From severe nipple pain and a bad latch, to low milk supply, nipple shields, nipple refusal. I think I faced more challenges than most. It took three long months before my daughter started breastfeeding properly.

There was so much stress, so many feeds followed by pumping sessions, leaving me with almost no time to rest. I felt like a failure. She would scream and refuse to latch, and I was trying so hard to make it work. Most of the time she’d only take a bottle of pumped milk, and sometimes we had to top up with formula. It felt like such a rejection. What was wrong with me?

I saw four different lactation consultants including the most expensive and in-demand one in Brisbane and still, it wasn’t working. The only time she’d latch was in the middle of the night, when she was too sleepy to protest or notice the difference.

I turned on myself. I emotionally punished myself, obsessively going over the same thoughts, reading everything I could online, trying to find a solution. I couldn’t let go. I had this idea of what my breastfeeding journey should look like, and because it didn’t match up, I saw myself as an epic failure.

This is when I realised I was holding myself up to some invisible ideal of what I thought a mother should be. I was failing to meet it. These negative thoughts pushed me deep into a negative place of postpartum depression and anxiety.

And then I saw that this fear of failure had been there in my creative life, too. I’ve always held myself to invisible standards to feel like I’m enough. I never thought of it as perfectionism as I’m naturally messy, creatively and in life — but still, this idea that I had to be “perfect” to be doing well, as a mother, a creative, a human, was always there in the background.

I didn’t crack the breastfeeding code. I didn’t have some magical surrender moment either. I muddled through the sleep-deprived fog, day after day. Then, one night, three months in, my daughter had a growth spurt and started waking to feed every two hours. Out of nowhere, her latch was stronger. She latched at midnight, then again at 2am, 4am, 6am. It kept happening. My milk supply increased. Eventually, she was breastfeeding properly, even refusing the bottle.

And that’s when I realised: maybe it wasn’t all me. Maybe it just took her body time to develop the strength to feed properly. I had blamed myself entirely. But the truth is, I just needed to keep responding to her, to keep muddling through and eventually, it resolved itself.

Trust the Process

I started to see how this mirrors my creative practice. The more I push myself to succeed, the more pressure I put on myself, the more stuck I feel. But when I let go a little, and just keep going (even clumsily), things often work themselves out.

There’s a phrase in art therapy: trust the process.

I think I’ve been obsessed with fixing things, when what I really need is to surrender to what’s happening and let it guide me. Maybe it’s a fear of powerlessness, of losing control. But when you’re working with children and with the unseen forces of creativity…how much can you really control?

Motherhood was sending me a big blinking message: it was time to face my issues with perfectionism and failure, the very same ones that had long affected my creative life.

Beginning Again

So even though I have less time than ever to make art, and even though motherhood has felt like the least creative time of my life. I’m realising these lessons can feed my creative and spiritual growth in ways I never expected.

This is the beginning of my reflective journey: The Creative Portal: essays about creativity, and the mysterious forces that move through it.

Because I’m a mother, navigating the transformational fire of early motherhood, that experience will inevitably leak into my writing. It consumes most of my life right now. My identity, time, and autonomy have been stripped away but after the hardest year of my life, I’m attempting to draw a map back to myself. Or maybe more accurately, to my new self, the one that holds both mother and artist.

I hope these essays offer something useful especially if you’re a creative mother. But even if you’re not, maybe some of these lessons will resonate with your own journey.

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