Creativity on the toilet
Creativity on the toilet.
I used to use my toilet breaks to check the football, wrestling, and current affairs news.
Then I had twins.
Bathroom breaks and the dog walk became my only windows to create.
Creativity is the dominant part of me.
I sometimes suffer from my own 'bull-in-a-china-shop' energy; never struggling with motivation, but suffering from too much. This means that when it comes to my self-initiated projects, be they pictures or words, I forget I am one person, overload, get overwhelmed, and struggle to focus my energy. (Often it is a benefit - this is not a complaint)
Parent friends who knew me warned that I would have to dispense with a certain amount of personal projects when the kids landed.
They were right. They also meant well, yet I used these warnings as motivation to write two books during the early part of parenthood.
This wasn't a plan. The first one, 'Isolation Watch: Falling Apart in the Pandemic' was a responsive, real-time take on the unprecedented first COVID-19 lockdown. Black comedy/observational fictional accounts of a community dealing with the situation we'd all been thrust into. I rattled out the daily installments (eventually the manuscript) during nap times, on dog walks, but predominantly on the toilet.
These toilet sessions preserved something vital for my mental health: the empowering purpose creativity provides. I refused to taint this wonderful new life experience with work stuff until I had to - besides, the babies didn't really give me a choice, but I had ideas.
To my surprise, the lack of sleep, while physically destructive, gave me a surprising amount of creative drive.
So I could either doze on the toilet, scroll through social media, or write a line or three, allowing the short bathroom breaks to define the sparse literary style of Isolation Watch and my 3rd book, 'YA MUM: and Other Stories from the Backstreets of Britain.'
As a new fiction writer, the time constraints were a massive benefit.
In his book 'Consider This,' author Chuck Palahniuk suggests that people who have little time to write might keep a notepad in the bathroom.
Hip hop legend Eminem says in Anthony Bozza's book, 'Whatever You Say I Am' that 'Slim Shady' - the name of his dark alter ego and foundation of his early records leaped from his subconscious while sitting on the toilet.
I suggested that another new parent friend create a tiered list of tasks/outlets from 'little time available' to 'a full day to create' from which they could choose no matter energy/time constraints, having found that writing just one good line in my phone's notes app was enough to get me through even the most challenging of parent days.
Resourcefulness is a commodity born of necessity. Must it be so? There are fewer certainties than toilet time each day. How do you use yours?