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Reconnecting with our inner artist this August – The Skinny

Reconnecting with our inner artist this August – The Skinny

Edinburgh in the summer always leaves me in a weepy, doubtful state of mind in the face of its many, many festivals. Every August, the city is overrun with performers and their audiences; acrobatics form the scaffolding of the Meadows, props fill buses and outsiders are pierced by homemade sound systems set up in my favourite Haymarket café. As someone who loves art and wants to ‘create’, it’s invigorating – but it also sends me back, terrifyingly, to my own blocks. I feel this inadequacy often, but it’s during the Fringe that I most feel the curtain parting between the artful life I want and the numbed 9-to-5 I lead.

I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time agonizing over why I no longer feel the urge to ‘create’, and why when I sit down to try and produce something ‘creative’, I can’t. It’s probably something that everyone I know has felt at some point, but it’s eating away at me in an existential way. After a few meltdowns, I was determined to find out: how do I fulfil my long-held desire to be creative? I’m the kind of person who googles my feelings, and I’ve gotten to the bottom of the internet. I knew that at this Fringe, to protect myself from a fatal blow to my self-concept, I had to take action. So I set myself up in a number of existing creative communities in Edinburgh to explore these questions.

I started with a life drawing class at Summerhall, led by Topaz. As I entered the Anatomy Lecture Theatre, I climbed the stairs to the top row to make sure my paper wouldn’t be seen. I remembered the description of this class, which said that people who ‘have absolutely no artistic ability are particularly welcome.’ If I were well-adjusted, I would simply be proud of my beginner status. Instead, I sat there, balled up, thinking back to the day I had made someone laugh for three minutes with a Pictionary drawing.

It was a special session. This week, the model posed in Shibari hanging straps. I set up my charcoal and watched the tying up begin. As the model was strapped across the chest, his head dropped back onto the rigger’s shoulder, soft and submissive—and I began to breathe. I worked on the poses, silent for almost two hours as the music played and the model rose into the air. Relaxed and moving more freely, I thought about stillness and attunement: what it takes to be with something, to respond rather than react from society’s scripts in our minds and bodies.

Illustration of a woman taking a drawing class and sketching a figure hanging from ropes from the ceiling.

Bearing witness is now a given—whether it’s about the pain of a friend, the everyday violence of this country’s systems, or the very current genocide in Gaza—but tuning in is not. It takes inertia to actually sit with something, and anyone under capitalism is going to struggle with this. I realized that part of the reason I struggled to express myself meaningfully was because I struggled to exist meaningfully in the world. The first step toward a more creative life, then, might be a step toward true presence and response.

Drawing from life was scarier than therapeutic dance, the next class I took, led by Lauren McGonagle in North Merchiston. It may be more vulnerable, but I’ve never made anyone laugh with my dancing. Every week is different, but this class was about resistance. I began with a free-association writing exercise about a part of myself that I felt resistant to, and was prompted to move improvisationally. I wrote about my numbness: the culprit, I believe, of so many of my creative blocks. I had already understood that my chronic numbness – of the Sad Girl variety – had given my lack of creativity its existential charge: if I don’t feel anything, I must have nothing to express. What kind of person has nothing to express?

But Lauren told me to turn my numbness into a movement; that’s when I realized my numbness wasn’t an absence, it was a huge presence. I started bowing my head, stubbing my limbs, and walking heavily. My numbness took over me, an expression in itself. I thought differently about this creative enemy afterward. Maybe numbness, like many of our most hated feelings, can’t be expressed in words. Maybe it can only be embodied. It’s a beginning: an unsteady but final statement. It means I am someone, even when I feel like I’m not.

I’ve had other creative experiences in the past few weeks. I was creative when I made a playlist, when I cooked dinner for my significant other, and when I read tarot cards for my friends. I know, logically, that I’m “creative” every day, but these micro-expressions don’t feel like enough when I put them up against the glossiest Fringe posters.

These lessons didn’t awaken my inner creative potential in the paradigm shift I wanted. They did, however, return my beliefs about creativity to a malleable space. I was finally able to address the things that block me. They haven’t gone away, but I can now shape them—and that act of shaping is, perhaps annoyingly, the most meaningful creative act. So this festival season, I won’t be walking the Meadows with a terrible existential longing. I will be walking to the places I’ve found in the cracks of the everyday, where we never quite get anywhere—and that’s the good part.