There’s nothing like a season of intense sleep deprivation to make you feel less than human—less than your whole self. There are days where I wonder how I ever strung words together in the first place. Days when I can barely read them. And days when the grumpy, and slow moving, winter bear of my body cannot imagine longing for anything else but blissful hibernation.
But those are not all my days since I stopped sleeping.
Certainly, on days like those, I need to practice what I preach about resting as I can, moving slowly, doing the bare minimum. But just a few months in to the most intense season of sleep deprivation of my life I began to realize that I was holding my breath—I was waiting until I was “sleeping more” (whatever that means?) before I allowed myself to use any of my precious spare minutes to make art. And I felt like a shadow of myself.
All of us are artists in some way or other. Emily P. Freeman is the one who first taught me that in her wonderful book A Million Little Ways. And more recently, Rachel Marie Kang has written a gorgeous book called Let There Be Art that I cannot wait to sink my teeth into. Ashlee Gadd too has written a book entitled Create Anyway that’s coming out in March. I’m not sure that I have more to say about making art than these wonderful authors, but I do want to add my two cents about making art during intensely exhausting seasons here, the upshot of which is simply this:
Don’t hold you breath. You don’t have to wait to create.
Now please don’t quote me on this as some kind of productivity guru. Don’t forget that this is by no means a hard and fast rule for life, because of course, there are moments when we must wait, at least for a time, to create. But what I am trying to say is that you don’t have to wait, and in fact, you mustn’t wait, for some imagined set of ideal circumstances to create. You are a creature breathed into being by an endlessly creative God, and breathing out your own creativity into the world is part of how we image him.
Nothing has made me angrier over the past 18 months than the limits imposed upon me by intense sleep deprivation. But I remember so clearly the day when I realized that part of why I was angry, was not simply because I was exhausted, but because I felt like a shadow of myself. I was holding my breath waiting for the sleep deprivation to end in order to be my full artistic self. This was partly self-inflicted, but partly inflicted by those well-meaning voices saying things to me like:
“You are pushing yourself too hard.”
“You can do that later.”
And sure, I will hopefully be able to write more in the future. At times I fantasize about the day I send my twins to kindergarten. But tomorrow is also not guaranteed to me, and I cannot wait for tomorrow to be, as Emily P. Freeman would say, “fully alive.”
The truth about my art (and probably yours too) is that there is an urgency behind my creativity that has nothing to do with productivity. I make, because I am. I write, because it’s part of how I think, how I process, how I discover Truth with a capital ‘T’. Like the Psalmist, I write from my struggle, and through the process of writing, come to deeper understandings of God’s faithfulness even in the midst of deeply troubling circumstances. These are not the only reasons I create, but they are some of the most meaningful for me.
Without my art then, I’m more than just a sleep deprived mess—I’m also deeply forgetful of everything I say I believe, and all that I have previously discovered to be true in the mist of all the hard. I say I believe that the seeds planted in suffering bloom into a crown of glory; but without writing through my pain, it’s hard to remember why I believe it.
Maybe you feel the same way?
In the midst of your own exhausting season, perhaps you have pushed your art to the back burner—and perhaps it’s time to pull it forward just a bit. Just enough to remind yourself that you are more than a pair of gritty eyes and exhausted hands going through the every day motions.
During the past eighteen months of my twin’s lives (but also during seasons of intense struggle with Ellie’s illness) my writing has not always come easily, but in fits and starts, it has come. I have scribbled lines of poetry on napkins, on my kitchen menu chalkboard, and in the tiny notebook I carry in my purse while stopped at a traffic light. My first essay to be published in print was actually written at the end of 2018 in stolen moments in between some of Ellie’s worst flare ups. An essay entitled Splendor: Glimpses of God’s Goodness in the midst of Suffering, (Published in the Summer 2019 Print issue of The Joyful Life Magazine) it was both the message, and the proof of God’s real-life-moment-by-moment provision for me in the depths of my struggle. This is not self-congratulations. Even as I write this, I cannot help but think back in utter amazement at the ways that God showed up to allow me those small moments to write those words, and gratitude for the ways he used those words, that art, to minister to me first. Sometimes my soul cannot rest, until I make art. And so creating may just be another path towards rest for the sleepless.
All this to say, if you feel your own artistic expression thrumming in your fingertips, you don’t have to wait for an easier season, a less sleep-deprived season, to make. And another important reminder; the heart of your art will probably be for you first—and that’s a good and beautiful thing.
So, what is it that you’d like to make? What creativity have you been putting off, but will now engage in more fully? How can you become more fully your artistic self, both for yourself and for others, even in the midst of this exhausting season?
Don’t hold your breath. You don’t have to wait to create.
I can’t wait to hear what you make.
Wishing you warmth and rest,
Grace E. Kelley