When You Postpone Your Creative Dreams

A dream deferred

What happens when you are a creative at heart, but you don’t pursue your creative dreams?

When I was a little girl art was my life. I used to paint, write stories, write plays and use my imagination.

I won a prize in short fiction at the age of eight. Storytelling was my passion and I would have my friends act in my theatre productions at home in front of my parents.

But then I got older and abandoned art and storytelling.

I got a job, I got married, I became a mother. I got caught up in the corporate grind and then later as an entrepreneur, I focused on money.

Inside of me I always knew that I was an artist, but I kept putting it aside and procrastinating.

I recently started to read the Artists Way and the first two chapters really described me perfectly.

In this book, Julia Cameron describes people who are creatives but postpone creative projects and make up excuses as to why they can’t pursuit an artists life.

She also describes how this people will work for creatives or marry an artist instead of doing the art themselves.

Even thought they have a dream to create one day, their negative inner dialogue prevents them from doing it.

Her book is a course on how to start creating again and provides specific exercises to overcome creative blocks.

I believe that if you postpone your creative dreams it can lead to mental health issues, and an identity crisis.

Langston Hughes summarized how I have been feeling for many years as an “inner artist” who never focused on their art in his poem Harlem:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

And that last line has stayed with me for many years.

When you know that deep down inside you are an artists where it be a writer, painter, storyteller, filmmaker, poet, musician…and you don’t focus on your art, it can eat you up inside.

Or it can explode.

We need art to make sense of the world around us. To process our emotions and our thoughts.

Many of us get busy with kids, family work and just living to pay bills and then feel miserable inside. Or even depressed.

I think that starting a creative project is necessary for mental peace.

For me even just writing on Substack is a way for me to awaken my creativity.

So my goals is to try to post and write here.

Using it as a weekly practice to put my ideas together, I engage more in critical thinking and discover new ways to be creative.

I’m also currently reading through the Artists Way book and course.

I’ll try to share how my progress is here on Substack.