Yah, normal is very boring hey.
There's a place for it in the world.
But how do you develop your own eccentricity,
your off centeredness,
so that you make your own
idiosyncratic contribution to the world?
It's about pushing those boundaries you know.
That's a terrible cliché.
It's overcoming that voice in your head,
which we've all got strangely,
that you're not good enough.
Once you let go of that voice
and you become more of your own character
and then you start liking the character you are,
even if it pisses other people off.
You know, you can't please everyone.
You may as well make sure that you're not
displeasing yourself all the time.
We are born creative beings. We are born playful beings.
And then we have it stamped out of ourselves
by the school system ironically.
And so we get tighter and tighter
and we sit stiller and stiller in a chair.
It's horrifying, the divorce that we have
with our own creativity.
It's this question of giving yourself permission.
And maybe writing helps that because
in writing you can be characters
that you would never be in your normal life.
I read a biography of Quentin Tarantino once.
And his best friend said,
'Thank goodness he ended up being a movie director and script writer,
otherwise he would have been a mass murderer.'
So I like to think that artists
would have been terrible human beings
if they hadn't been artists you know.
The page is a very safe place
and you can be whatever you like on the page.
And maybe it allows you to relax a little bit more in your life.
It's about getting curious about what's happening to you
so that you live more deeply.
Two things happened in my life which made me stop
and consider that I didn't know where I was going
and I didn't know what was going to happen next.
I got an eye condition, an auto immune condition,
and the other one was my son had a very serious injury,
a head injury.
It was an extremely anxious time you know.
I couldn't see a way out of this situation.
I had to find ways of coping with it.
And writing was the thing that got me through actually.
It contains you when you are flung apart with anxiety.
It gives you a tool to take the thing that disturbs you
and explore it out in the world.
So it doesn't just sit as this mush in your body,
causing grief.
You start bringing it out and giving it shape in the world.
And then you start having this conversation
with what you don't know about your own anxiety.
What we know and our identity, is this small,
and the unconscious is that big.
Our egos are little corks floating on the ocean.
So you've got this massive resource of the unconscious
and we are trained, I think by society,
not to trust the unconscious.
We've got to get curious, why are we doing this?
You never know what's going to arrive from the unconscious
because you're not working with what you know.
So there will be a little phrase that comes to mind,
that's a poetic phrase that could be the beginning of a poem.
Or it'll be an image that draws you
which could be the beginning of a painting.
Or there's a feeling inside you
that wants expression through movement.
Take it seriously. Don't say oh that's rubbish,
let me go and watch TV.
Take it, and explore it, and play with it.
We are storytellers.
We are born storytellers.
If we valued our own creativity for its own sake,
for our own mental health sake,
I think the world would look like a very different place.
Hi everyone. Thanks so much for watching this weeks film.
We really appreciate all your wonderful comments.
It really helps to motivate us,
wanting to make these films even better for you guys.
If you would consider donating towards us
and helping support us
just click on the link below.