#I've been reading a LOT of theory lately and doodling little illustrations from passages or images the writers use

[ruegracieuse]

this is random and a little embarrassing but i was curious about ur blog so i read a little and then was charmed by the way you write and express yourself and found myself relating a lot to how you have described your relationship to creativity, to the daunting challenges by the actual praxis and being a midwife to one's own creative visions and dreams and i hope you have cultivated and realized more of your courage in actualizing your ambitions as i can already tell they would be delightful to experience and witness ! I hope life is being kind to you 🤍

Hi! Please don't be embarrassed - this message is so lovely! I've been in a bit of a funk today and it sounds silly but reading this really made the clouds break a little bit :-) I really love the way you express yourself as well, this message is so well-written and the beautifully written. I love the phrase 'midwife to one's own creative visions' - it is really true that fostering and sustaining both creativity and courage is a delicate, ongoing and often exhausting task, but one of the most precious things we can do.

As far as realising courage in my own life is concerned - there are so many ways I've been wanting to till and sow and raise the seedlings of my own creativity. I want to learn how to knit, I want to do my watercolours more regularly, but most of all I want to share my writing. That last one absolutely requires the most courage, and the most work - I'm pretty good at regularly writing little snippets in my notebook or on my phone, but I am desperately shy about sharing them. I also want to build short stories rather than keeping things as little creative micro-pieces or paragraphs. But perhaps beginning by sharing some of my small, off-the-cuff writings will help.

I'm in the thick of applying for PhD programmes at the moment, which I do think is a creative venture - all good scholarship I believe requires just as much creative thinking and practice as it does analysis. Contacting scholars I admire and asking if they'd like to supervise me and pitching my idea and growing it into a fleshed proposal has required a little courage, so hopefully I'm not fully failing myself on the courage side of things - it's just taken a slightly different form than what I was anticipating. This message is a little spur to put myself out there in the areas I care about, too - it really is so lovely, and so humbling, to think that someone else out there enjoys the way I have thought about and expressed something.

I hope life is being kind to YOU, and have a lovely day/evening, wherever you are <3