This past week or so, I’ve been feeling really stressed as homework, midterms, and dance performances seemed to be piling up with no hope for a reprieve. The constant stress has been making it a bit hard for me to concentrate as I feel that my mind is always 100 different places at the same time. For my inspiration assignment this week, I decided to work on letting go of that stress and clearing my head. In order to do that, I settled on doing a writing activity I used to do a lot in high school called a “free write” in which you take a piece of paper and a pencil and you set a time for yourself, I chose 15 minutes, and the pencil isn’t allowed to stop moving for the entire time. You just keep writing, anything, it doesn’t, whatever is going on in your head you just put onto paper. This was really helpful to me in terms of inspiration since I had been feeling stuck on a lot of the projects, papers, choreo, that I had been trying to work on since every time I would get into the zone, my mind would jump to a different place and break my ability to focus on thinking deeply about what I was trying to do. Having a clear mind is important to me for inspiration, and so this free write assignment gave me the opportunity to focus on all the random things going through my mind, look at them, examine them, and then discard them. By the time that the timer went off, I had two pages filled with random song lyrics, repeated words or phrases such as “bread” for whatever reason, but my mind felt clear for the first time in about a week. This assignment gave me the opportunity to press the restart button on my mind and go back to my assignments able and ready to tackle them again.
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