Thoughts on the creative slump
by Steve Xoh

I’ve been thinking a lot about creative slump recently, having found myself in a rather big one during August. It is a recurring thing for me, but this time I experimented by sharing my experience of it a bit more overtly. As a result of this I got a number of supportive and encouraging messages from people telling me that it would soon pass and that I would soon be making more fabulous art once again. These messages were nice to receive and its always good to hear that my art means something to others. But these messages also caused me to reflect on the fact that my experience of a creative slump is so much more than just a diminishing of my artistic output.

One of the things that has become more noticeable over the last 15 years since I set out to work for myself and live a life more aligned to my creative philosophies is that the boundaries between different parts seem to have dissolved. I find it hard to distinguish between what is work and what isn’t work. (Which is different to distinguishing between what earns and doesn’t earn me money - which is very easy to do!) I also find it hard hard to distinguish between which mode of “work” I am doing. At various different times I am in a different mode of being an artist, a podcaster, an audio producer, a coach, a consultant, a speaker, an academic, a writer, a facilitator (and so on.) All of these forms feel like slightly different patternings of the same thing for me. Simply different moments of spontaneous self-expression. I find labels problematic, especially labels to do with who I am and what I do which is why I gave up on the idea of having a neat and eloquent elevator pitch many years back. (My friend and colleague Charlotte Sills once told me “Labelling is the last thing you do when you make jam!”)

This lack of boundaried division really works for me. I find it means that I can settle more into a continual flow of my experience without having to make clunky feeling adjustments from one ill-fitting label to the next. But often others find this lack of boundaried division concerning. What about my work-life balance? Where is the leisure time and the hobbies? When do I relax? Don’t work too hard! And whilst I appreciate the concern I can’t help but notice that it all arises from the social construction of the “work vs life balance” - a concept which I appreciate is helpful for some but I simply cannot relate to in any meaningful way. (And I have some suspicions about how this whole work-life separation thing might actually be an unhealthy philosophy to live our lives by.)

But even though I find it hard to relate to this concept, my resilience and wellbeing are very important to me. So rather than paying attention to the balance between work vs life, the important thing is whether my activities balance out in terms of energy, meaning and spirit. Whilst this isn’t a well thought through theory, these three factors feel like they are key components of my own resilience and wellbeing. Some activities expend more than others and some are more renewing than others. But most of the time, I can find that sweet spot where my day to day experience involves cycles of expending and renewingnthat overall keep me in the black. (My friend Rowan Gray was instrumental in helping me to learn this when he wired me up with a heart rate variability monitor back in 2017 which gave me undeniable day to day data about how my body and nervous system were doing over the period of a very intense week.)

But every now and then this balance starts to slip. It tends to creep up on me ever so gradually with different experiences and life circumstances slowly eroding my energy, meaning and spirit until I suddenly realise that I am sliding down a slippery slope. And by the time I notice this is happening I realise there is little I can do about it. My capacity to maintain the fine balance begins ebbing away and the more effort I put into trying to fight against the downward trajectory, the more energy I expend and the worse it gets. And that’s when I start to hit what I call the creative slump. (Which feels like a much nicer way of describing what is likely a combination of stress, anxiety, depression, physical depletion and burnout.)

It is when this happens that the lack of boundaries between the different parts of my life become problematic. Rather than just my artistic output suffering, everything does. As everything I do is essentially part of the same stream of creative self expression literally everything becomes heavy and hard and I just have to go into some sort of standby or safe mode, preserving only the vital processes like eating, drinking and exercise and wait for the dark clouds to slowly lift. And it is is this process of sitting with the slump that I am fascinated by.

I have learnt that, for me, the only way out of the slump is to learn to fully surrender to it. To deeply experience the thoughts, feelings, emotions and sensations of being in the slump as fully as possible. To acknowledge them, be curious about them but not try to change them in any way. I find comfort in the buddhist mantra that “the obstacle becomes the path” and this philosophy helps me immensely in these moments. To move towards the thing that I am trying to resist or escape from. It always feels counter-intuitive but as Eckhart Tolle suggests “what you resist, persists.”

This philosophy of surrender helps me in ways that I do not fully understand. It feels like through doing this I emerge from a slump having shed some layers that needed shedding. Maybe feeling closer and more connected to the raw and vulnerable core of my creative self-expression. Maybe the creative slump is actually like some sort of instinctual hibernation - a call to withdraw and shut down temporarily and enter some strange and difficult metamorphic state in order to emerge lighter and more full of wonder on the other side. A lot of exciting things tend to emerge from the slump. Big projects, experimental ideas, a renewed enthusiasm and fascination with the weirdness of life. This Substack, the podcast, the Back Gaemen project, my trip to the beach hut with Poppy and lots of other things that I feel motivated, intrigued and excited by right now have emerged from the most recent slump.

And whilst I can never think as clearly and hopefully as this when I am actually in the slump, it feels helpful to recognise the cyclical nature of it and to maybe think of it more as a natural and necessary part of the ongoing flow of my experience.