Stepping Off Now: Support for Neurodivergent Creatives

I've never been able to figure out if I'm a highly ambitious person or not ambitious enough. What I've settled on is that while my culture tells me I should be ambitious, at heart I'm just not. When I start getting ambitious about my work, my stress levels rise and my burnout is triggered again. In this episode I discuss ambition in reference to creative work and how we can have goals for ourselves while avoiding the negative impact of ambition.

Honest Rox's newsletter about the impact of US culture

BBC article about Niksen

Psychology Today article on ambition

Will AI-created art change the way we view art and our relationship with it as consumers and creators? I contemplate this question in light of Frank Ocean's ostensibly disastrous but possibly brilliant performance at Coachella this year and the viral hit song featuring Drake and the Weeknd that turned out to be fake.

My Instagram

Article on Frank Ocean in the Ringer (by Jeff Weiss).

Article on Frank Ocean in GQ (by Eileen Cartter).

Switched On Pop episode on the Drake/Weeknd AI song

Following your intuition when you are being nudged off course is a vital creative skill, but many of us are held hostage by plans and struggle to accept interruptions as positive. We feel derailed and like we're losing control. But creativity requires interruption, because it opens space for something new and unexpected to arise. In this episode I discuss how to facilitate constructive use of interruptions in your life and creative practice by listening to your intuition. Intuition doesn't show up in the way we expect it to, so I also talk about what intuition really feels like when it strikes.

My Instagram

 

Lately I've been struggling with a growing awareness of pessimism and negativity around me in the world. It seems we are in an age of insecurity, fear, and suspicion. Then the other day I read about the Spiral Jetty, a work of land art on the edge of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and it got me thinking about what art can teach us about dealing with the inevitability of change, struggle, and entropy. Ultimately the way we perceive the world is up to us, and greeting all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams with pessimism and negativity is not our only option. 

When we get stuck in life we can easily find reasons why we can't make the changes we need to make. But those aren't the real reasons we remain stuck. It's our feelings of powerlessness over our circumstances that really hold us back. In this episode I talk about different ways we give away our power to effect change in our lives and practices we can use to get it back. 

Do you ever feel like you have lost your creative inspiration, or worse, that you don't have enough to begin with? In this episode I talk about how to cultivate inspiration by doing the opposite of what our instincts tell us. We're socialized to believe that if we want something, we need to aggressively go after it, even "attack" it. But when it comes to creative inspiration, this will only make it harder to come by. So what can you do instead? Listen to find out!

It's a common assumption that highly creative people are more prone to mental illness. Van Gogh is perhaps one of the most famous examples of the mad creative genius archetype. But is there a scientifically verifiable link between creativity and mental illness? This is part of a recent research-based bonus episode I did for my Patreon subscribers at the $5 tier.

Here is the Scientific American article I cite

My episode on the Default Mode Network and creativity is #89.

I recently saw a play called Women Playing Hamlet (by William Missouri Downs) that explores the idea of playing roles others cast us in versus choosing the roles we play and inhabiting them fully through full knowledge of the self. In this episode I ask the question, why do we hesitate to cast ourselves in the roles of our choosing? Why do so many of us continue to play it safe by not stepping into our identities as writer/musician/artist/etc.? How long are we going to continue on playing the roles other people have chosen for us, or ones we think we should be playing, before we find the courage to cast ourselves in a role for our own fulfillment?

My episode on Hollywood comeback stories

My blog post Breaking Into the Chocolate Factory

Creatives are often told they need to take risks in order to reach their full potential, but what does that mean, exactly, and how does one do it? If you google creative risk you'll find tons of resources on the why of risk but not the what kind and how. In this episode I seek to fill some of those gaps of knowledge. I explore three types of creative risk and discuss how you can approach them through process rather than big, scary leaps.

There is no question that we are now in the era of AI, and everyone is talking about what AI-generated art means for the art industry and individual artists. In this episode I talk about how creatives and artists can handle our anxieties around what the future holds as AI-generated art gluts up the system and decreases space for our own art. I include some thoughts on what we as real humans can offer that AI can't, and how that will change what we view as art and the location of where we find value in the process of making art.

Jane Friedman's website

My blog post about sharing your process