Making stuff makes you feel better

Making stuff makes you feel better.

A few generations back, making stuff was what we did. We used to do a lot more with our hands. I have some beautiful pieces of furniture made by my great grandfather. My grandparents built their own house. I have a shawl knitted by my grandmother. A quilt made by my mother.

There’s something a bit magic about starting with nothing and ending up with something that wasn’t there before. Aside from the end result, there’s also something a bit magic about what happens when we’re engaged in the process of creating. The ‘doing’ bit.

If you see yourself as a creative person, you might know this already.

But if you don’t see yourself as creative, or you feel intimidated by the thought of starting to draw or crochet or restore furniture or whatever idea is trying to get your attention, making stuff can feel like a hard mountain to climb.

Specially when coupled with the idea that’s fairly prevalent that you don’t get to be creative unless you have talent. Unless what you create is “good art”. Which is highly subjective - there is heaps of art on gallery walls I personally don’t like at all, which doesn’t make it “bad”, just means it’s not to my taste.

And there’s plenty of art on gallery walls that I could stare at for years.

We also have the tendency to compare our messy learning, trying, figuring out process with other people’s polished finished results. That’s a good recipe for finding it hard to get started.

So what do we do with all this? How do we evade the voices that tell us we have to be talented, that tell us what we create has to be ‘good’ in order for us to be allowed to create at all? How do we access the magic of the ‘doing’ bit of creating something?

One way can be to set up a different measure of success. If ‘success’ is that you spent ten minutes colouring in - then it matters less what the end result looks like. If ‘success’ is that you feel less anxious and more peaceful, then it matters less what the end result looks like. If ‘success’ is that you learned something new through the process of doing, then it matters less what the end result looks like.

What might you create, if you get curious about what you might learn and how it might feel? (And yes, frustration is often part of the emotional journey when you’re making things - and it’s an excellent way to learn the skill of how to keep going when you want to give up, which is transferable to so many situations in life).

If you’d like to explore this with a friendly group of like minded people, perhaps you’d like to join me and my good friend and art therapist colleague Rose in our fortnightly Therapeutic Art Group? We’ll be creating something new each fortnight, and it’s a beautiful place to come and try things out, make a mess, learn some new skills and learn things about yourself that perhaps you didn’t know before in a supportive environment.

The first group is on October 12 - click here to find out more and book your spot. We’d love to create with you. And in the meantime… what else could you make with your magic hands?