did something i don't normally do

today and it felt ok! not great, but not bad and with not even a hint of guilt...

i went to a one day writing workshop today at the nsw writers centre - have done a few courses there over the years...today's was 'write your vision' with a published author/life coach

was a good day - lots of thought provoking exercises (altho turns out i had slightly misinterpreted the blurb to mean that it was about writing your vision for the creative writing you wanted to do - nope, it was more broad than that) and some really lovely women (no men in this one - altho it is open to men)...

so one of the exercises was doing a collage by cutting up magazines and postcards and frankly i don't find that sort of thing works for me - i've tried in previous workshops and struggled through the exercise conscious of how 'un-visual' i am compared to some...

so today instead of making myself do it, i simply gave myself permission not to do it...initially felt kinda weird, as whilst everyone else was busily gathering magazines and glue, i found myself looking through the 2nd hand books which are on sale throughout the building...

but since this 'activity' was to take up to 40 minutes i decided i would make good use of the time - so instead of creating a collage (which was intended to be in some way linked to my vision for myself) i read over some of my writing for both novels i'm attempting to write and spent the time thinking about the plots for both and how i could (having learned this at another workshop) make sure they had sufficient momentum - hadn't realised how much i had done and in some cases, the quality of the work surprised me...

see the other hard thing about the collage is this: i did my own (big 1.2m x 1.2m that dominated half of one wall in my study in winter last year) vision and i feel as though i wasn't there to create a vision but simply to get some inspiration for my novel writing...

so not doing what was asked and giving myself permission to do something more valuable to me, whilst it seems like a small step, was in fact a big thing for me and i'm proud of myself...

so that's not it! now that i have done it once, i hope that doing it in future will become easier, and eventually it may become habit!

now all i have to do is identify what it was about the environment today that made me feel safe enough to do it, and go about replicating it when i need to - sounds easy enough right??