Is your creativity sliding off the cracker?

I love a good metaphor and this week I heard one that perfectly described the situation of being a midlife woman in the sandwich generation.

This week I had squeezed an appointment in at the doctors to talk about my HRT and ended up spilling everything to the kindly nurse practitioner about how I was trying to build and run two businesses, manage the care needs of an ageing parent, support my anxious teenage daughter, still get used to life without the regular and reliable income of a teacher and feeling all over the place some days, plus dealing with driving anxiety.

She listened patiently and said “You’re not alone feeling like this. There’s many women whose cheese is balancing on the edge of the cracker.”

It stopped me in my tracks, the vision of a piece of cheddar hanging precariously off the edge of a buttered Jacob’s Cracker. We laughed. And in that moment things eased a bit. There's something about hearing you’re not an isolated case, a sense of comfort that it’s not something you've done or your fault you find yourself in this sticky mess.

That metaphor stayed with me all week and when a friend I hadn’t seen for a long time asked me a few days later how my own writing was going, I immediately thought: ‘it’s fallen off the cracker.’

I often talk and write about the messy middle of a novel draft being the place where you put your protagonist under so much pressure. What she has believed for a long time is tested again and again. She is confronted with decisions she cannot avoid. Stretched to a point she has never been before, and this is why she feels so real to the reader. If her life were just a breeze, we wouldn’t even care about her.

Perhaps that's why the metaphor has really stayed with me. My own cheese has been sliding for a while, and often creativity is the first thing to go, imperceptibly, without noise because no one else is depending on this commitment. It is a commitment to myself and we are often the first person to let down when life gets messy and complicated.

But what if this pressure that pushes creativity to the bottom of the to-do list could be the thing that fuels that creativity? What if I can find fifteen minutes on the most stretched, cheese-sliding day of the week and infuse my protagonist’s life with the same tension I am feeling? It could work. It is, after all, that internal conflict which drives the change in a novel.

I certainly feel my life is testing me right now, pushing me to build on what I’m made of, test things I believe, forge new beliefs, and, unlike a novel, I know there won’t be some tidy resolution. I am living in my own messy middle.

I haven't worked out how to stop the sliding cheese. I'm not sure that's really the point.

So a question for you to reflect on: Is your cheese teetering on the edge of the cracker this week or has it slid clean off? In your writing or anywhere else?

I'd love to know how you're holding it together, or whether you've let a bit of it slide, and what that's taught you.

Photo by Anita Peeples on Unsplash