Creative circuit overload
When too many ideas trip the switch
In our house, turn on the microwave and the electric kettle at the same time and you’re plunged into darkness.
We forget all the time.
Sometimes we get away with it, which naturally makes us a bit blasé. Until it happens again, of course, taking us by surprise, as if we didn’t know what might happen.
Luckily, it’s a quick fix by flipping the circuit breaker back up, but better, I can’t help but think, if we didn’t overload the system in the first place.
Will we change? Probably not.
Creative overload
There are a few ways to overload an electric circuit.
Plugging too many appliances into a single outlet, for instance, outdated wiring, or using high-wattage devices or something that’s faulty.
And this seems a remarkably apt analogy for what can happen when we create something.
For me, it’s usually music and writing, and this newsletter is the perfect example of the latter.
This week’s newsletter, for example, started life as something else, a something crowded with ideas jostling for position, way too many for one humble little newsletter.
Each time I sit down to write I can feel the pressure building as I pick away at the knots formed from all the different strands. So many ideas, and none of them doing anything much apart from bumping into each other.
And just like with electricity, no amount of flicking the light switch will help me until I reset the system. This is the point where I eventually, finally, order myself to step back, flip the switch, so to speak, and rethink it all.
Choose one idea, Kate, and stick to it. But make sure you save the rest for another time.
So that’s what I try to do.
I wrestle with which way to go, anguish over making the wrong decision, but eventually decide. I settle on one idea and everything else goes into my ideas folder, ready to shine another day.
It’s not easy.
Not when my inclination is to keep going, no matter how close I might be getting to circuit overload. Not when it feels like failure to admit defeat, to admit that the increasingly tangled weave of ideas just isn’t going to work, even after all the time I’ve devoted to it.
But I’ve also come to realise that this is how it is.
That I will regularly continue to come close to circuit overload, sometimes forced to flip my own circuit breaker, and sometimes backing away before everything blows.
It’s just the way it so often is when I’m creating something.
Sound familiar?