I’ve been recommending the book “Creative Dysregulation” by Kelly Wilde Miller to every creative I’ve talked to in the last month.

It’s a relatively simple book (it was written in 5 days!), but it’s jam packed with good stuff. Miller breaks down creative dysregulation (which covers the multitude of ways creative processes break down) into eight categories:

  • Emotional
  • Motivational
  • Physical
  • Mental
  • Inherited
  • Spiritual
  • Logistical
  • Identity

There’s a self assessment that she includes so you can get a feel for where your regulation issues are. I ended up with low scores (more disregulated) on the emotional, motivational, and spiritual dimension. Technically I scored pretty well in the spiritual self assessment but I was left feeling like I was missing the spiritual dimension of my work so I’m including it here.

You can see my hand drawn self assessment results below.

Creative Dysregulation Self Assessment

I had two big changes that came in the short term from reading the book.

I realized that the spiritual dimension of my work was missing. This is has encouraged me to really dive into my values and start examining how my work is related to them.

This has been a terrifying process. I haven’t been watching my values because there’s part of me that believes that I won’t be able to live up to them. That part is convinced that I don’t have the strength to do it, that I’ll always default to the easy path. Understanding and unpacking that voice has been a lot. Good, but a lot.

I did a Creative Funeral and it’s why this web-log exists. One of the exercises that Miller suggests in the book is a Creative Funeral, a ritual to let go of creative projects that are past their time but still taking up mental space. For me, it involved letting go of a number of projects that had lost all vibrancy and letting go of my expectations of other projects.

I called the letting go of expectation process a half funeral. So in the case of this web-log, I needed to let go of my expectations of audience focused, metric overdriven writing that characterized my past attempts at blogging. I’m still energized by the image of myself as someone who writes on the internet so it wasn’t time for a full funeral for blogging.

Bringing these two threads together, part of what I realized in this letting go process was that I entered into blogging in search of two of my values: freedom and community. I wanted intellectual freedom, and I wanted a community to interact with around the ideas I cared about.

When I entered in my first attempt at blogging on Medium, I prioritized the community aspect. I wrote titles to attract people, and focused on metrics, and quietly despaired that no one really got where I was coming from.

Now, I’m prioritizing the freedom aspect. Write what I want, with a lightweight process, on a corner of the internet that places no expectations on people finding or interacting with my work.

Letting go of the old expectations has been energizing in ways I hadn’t expected. This web-log feels easeful in a way that the other one hadn’t, and it feels so much more sustainable because of it. I even started interacting with my old work again, sharing it without shame. In fact the night after I did the Creative Funeral, I read one of my old blog posts as a character monologue at a talent show. It was completely new and it felt great.