…which I don’t totally agree with, but there we go, there are phases in my creativity that weirdly align with those of my oldest sister (I have two sisters, both a lot older than me). If I phone her up and say, “I just can’t do this right now, I haven’t the energy” then 9 times out of 10 she’ll be in the same place. Or if I’m suddenly full of ideas springing from some previously undiscovered fountain of lateral thinking, she will often be just the same, even if we haven’t spoken to each other in a week. But here’s how it’s been for me.
1. the event and the weird floating auto-pilot mode that possesses you for a good two weeks whilst you sort out getting yourself on a plane and the funeral and the first everest of paperwork and making sure that everyone else is fed and watered. The most creative thing here is the eulogy, which I just had to write in one or two drafts because I couldn’t functionally deal with it any other way. And yet you want to do the person justice. So, yeah.
2. burst of creativity, but totally basic. I got really into colouring in books. I think I filled up three or four. I also was very into listmaking, which is always a habit of mine, but a habit that went completely fucking bananas in this phase.
3. second burst of creativity was actually very intense, lasted three or four days during which I just wrote absolute crap but completely felt the need to write it. I was writing different stories and all of them never moved past 2,000 words but I felt incredibly compelled to write them.
4. barren. I only could think of one thing to write about, or two things, but they wouldn’t be helpful or healthy and I had no idea how to approach them without becoming in some way a victim of them. It’s around this time that I went back to university.
5. academic writing and research-based creativity. First wave of back-to-school joy made this quite enjoyable. That wonderful October I-can-do-anything!
6. essay deadlines and everything beginning to slowly very slowly sink in led to a very feverish, manic kind of writing. Better than most things I’ve written in a long time, but impossible to tune back into if I suddenly crash and all the energy goes.
7. NaNoWriMo fever. I-can-do-anything! Sprints with Kristina over Skype, feeling competitive as I look at word counts until… essay deadlines.
8. painting? drawing? I don’t know where this came from, I hadn’t painted in years and I’m very shit at it, but I suddenly felt a compulsion to draw my dad, to paint him, to represent him because language had completely failed me. It also was slowly becoming apparent that the video clips I had of him were limited and that some memories fade quickly.
9. crash bang wallop
10. here. drained of energy but full of ideas. Persevering on this one novel idea but ought to be focusing on a 3,000 word essay and a dissertation proposal. What I choose to write academically will soon form a number that will say something about me (degree classification is a bitch). On the phone one minute and on a train home twenty-five minutes later.
Now that assumes that the phases are discrete, which they aren’t, by any means. The issue I have with the traditional “phases of grief” is that one moment in a day you’ll be feeling denial and the next you’ll be enraged then accepting then all of those things again at once. I don’t think you can ever really complete the grieving process until, to borrow an expression from Never Let Me Go, we ourselves complete. Not that you always have to be in a state of grief, more that grief can’t be thought of on an arbitrarily linear timeline. We see how those ideas of linearity and excessively simplistic notions of linear progress are flawed and exclude many points of regression. Besides, saying the grieving process is over suggests that there’s some kind of norm you can get back to, and you can’t — that’s not melodramatic, just the truth. So I suppose I have to make the active decision not to think in phases, not to chart my “progress”, as tempting as it is, because ultimately it is unhealthy and it just makes me lie to myself.
