Journal

Why There’s a Photograph of My 20-Year-Old Self in My Journal

We’re often told to think back to what we loved at age seven or eight to reconnect with ourselves. But what if there’s a different photograph, a different age, that captures something more useful? This week I’m talking about finding the version of yourself who had fire in your eyes before life dulled it down, and why I’m using a photograph of my 20-year-old self as a kind of talisman.

The Problem with “Play” in Creativity (And What It Actually Means)

A few weeks ago, someone in The Studio brought a perfectionism problem to our Friday gathering. She couldn’t start projects, or if she did, she felt she’d already ruined them before she’d really begun. Everyone offered advice, and the same word kept coming up: “Play. Just play with it.”

But I noticed I was having a strong physical reaction to that word. It conjured up bright colours, noise, children’s TV energy - everything that makes me uncomfortable. So I went for a walk to figure out what was going on.

Turns out, my understanding of creative play was completely wrong - or at least unnecessarily narrow.

What Play Actually Means

Play in making isn’t about being loud or messy or forcing yourself to be spontaneous. It’s simpler than that: making something with no set outcome, no purpose to measure against, and therefore no way to be perfectionist about it.

In this week’s Friday Film, I share three real examples from Studio members showing what this looks like in practice:

• Making quilts in deliberately uncomfortable colours
• Drawing with your non-dominant hand to see what emerges
• Understanding that nobody else knows what you were trying to make

Plus the story of my embroidered duck that, according to my friend, looks like it’s been run over. She’s not entirely wrong.

Watch: Creative Play & Perfectionism

If you struggle with perfectionism or getting started on creative projects, this might help. It’s not about adding another practice to your day - it’s about recognizing the play that’s probably already there in your making.

 

You Are Creative (Even If You Think You Can’t Draw)

One of the things that comes up a lot when people join The Studio is “I’m not actually very creative” or “I can’t draw.”

I understand that completely. I wasn’t allowed to continue with art past primary school because I was deemed not good at it. I didn’t pick up a pencil again until I was 45. Even when I was spending hours doing freehand machine embroidery—literally drawing with a sewing machine—I still told people “I can’t draw.”

But looking at historical embroidery over the past year has shown me that what I believed about creativity just isn’t true.

 

The coverlet that changed my thinking

There’s a coverlet in the V&A collection I’ve been studying. About eight feet long, embroidered onto linen with silk and silver thread, probably made around 1610-1620.

Two things are obvious when you look closely. First, it’s unfinished—you can still see the pen and ink lines that were meant to be covered with stitching. Despite all the expensive gold thread work, whoever made it never quite finished.

Second, there are several of the same animal scattered across it. Several lions. Several porcupines. Several hares. All similar but slightly different—one a bit wonkier, the spacing varies.

They weren’t drawn freehand. They were copied.

How they actually worked

Embroiderers would take printed woodcuts and use pricking and pouncing. You’d prick holes along the lines with a needle, then use powdered charcoal to pounce through onto fabric. That gave you a dotted outline to draw between.

You could use the same pattern multiple times—several lions, several elephants. But because you moved the paper slightly, or your hand wavered, each one came out a bit different.

There were also professional designers who would draw complete designs onto linen, fill them in with watercolour, and sell them. Early embroidery kits. You didn’t have to invent anything yourself.

 

The wonkiness is part of it

This museum piece was probably copied from printed sources, repeated using the same pattern, slightly wonky. And it’s lovely. The differences between each animal give it life.

I’ve been copying these animal designs onto linen and embroidering them with plant-dyed wool. They’re wonky. The lions don’t match. And they feel connected to something old but also completely mine.

What I’m realising

I’d assumed that being creative meant inventing completely original designs from nothing. No copying. No tracing. No help.

But that’s not how people actually worked. Elizabethan embroiderers used woodcut patterns. Winifred Nicholson copied designs from postcards for her rag rugs. People worked from sources. Their versions came out different because their hands moved differently, but they started by looking at something that already existed.

In The Studio now, we’re making embroidered linen bags using traditional smocking patterns and Elizabethan animal designs. Nobody’s inventing from nothing. We’re looking at historical patterns and making our own versions.

The video above goes into more detail about the coverlet and these techniques.

If this sounds familiar

If you’ve been telling yourself you’re not creative, try copying something. Trace it. Use transfer paper. Your version will come out wonky. The museum pieces are wonky too. That’s part of what makes them beautiful.

Join The Studio if you’d like a space to try this with others discovering they’re more creative than they thought.

Time for a Reset? Question the Labels You’ve Given Yourself

The sun stands still twice a year.

Well, not literally. But for about 12 days around each solstice, something interesting happens. If you watch from the same spot each morning or evening, the sun appears to rise and set at nearly the same place on the horizon. It’s barely moving. Less than one-sixtieth of its own diameter per day.

This is where the word “solstice” comes from: Latin sol (sun) + sistere (to stand still).

We tend to think of the solstice as a single moment—the shortest day, the longest night. Here in Scotland, that’s about 7.5 hours of daylight on the winter solstice. But the standstill is longer than that. It’s the entire period when the sun appears motionless along the horizon. About six days either side of the solstice itself. Twelve days total.

And if you look at our winter traditions, they cluster around this number. The twelve days of Christmas. Twelfth Night. The Yule log—an enormous branch that would be brought into the house and burned slowly over twelve days, moved along in the hearth as it burned down.

People have always understood this as a threshold. A bridge from one part of the year to another.

What the monuments tell us

Five thousand years ago, Neolithic communities built massive stone monuments aligned to this moment. Not just to the solstice itself, but to the entire standstill period.

At Maeshowe in Orkney, the entrance passageway is positioned so that for these twelve days, when the sun sets on a clear day (not always guaranteed in Scotland), the light travels all the way along the passage and into the womb-shaped chamber. The passage was deliberately shortened at the entrance to create the most spectacular ribbon of light possible—focused, concentrated, flooding the back wall.

The same at Clava Cairns near Inverness. Passage tombs, carefully aligned, engineered to capture this specific light at this specific time.

We don’t actually know what they were doing there. We have no idea what their beliefs were. Was it about gathering to honor ancestors? A private ritual for the dead? Something to do with death and rebirth? We don’t know. We’ll probably never know.

But we know it mattered. It mattered enough to move massive stones, to calculate precise alignments, to gather there year after year for thousands of years.

And I think it should still matter to us. Not because we need to recreate Neolithic rituals, but because at heart, we’re the same people. We respond to seasonal shifts, to darkness and light, to thresholds and turning points. We just have houses and cars and electric lights to insulate us from feeling it as urgently as they did.

The box I’ve been living in

I’ve been thinking a lot about boxes lately. Labels. Binary categories we put ourselves into.

I realized recently that I describe myself as an “extreme introvert.” Not just someone who needs alone time to recharge—extreme. Someone who is depleted by social interaction, who does best work in solitude, who fundamentally needs to be away from people.

And I think... some of that is true. I do benefit from silence and solitude when I need to replenish. But I’m not sure the extreme part is actually accurate. I think it might just be conditioning.

Because when I trace it back, the “extreme” bit started during COVID. I was shielding for a year—high risk, staying inside, not seeing anyone. And my nervous system adapted. Inside my house, away from other people, doing my own thing, mixing with the world through screens—that became safe. Outside my house, where I couldn’t control proximity, where other people might be carrying something dangerous—that became unsafe.

That was a realistic response to real circumstances. But somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking of it as “my nervous system has adapted to threat” and started thinking of it as “this is just who I am.”

The label became comfortable. It explained why I didn’t want to go out. Why I preferred my own company. Why social situations felt hard. “I’m an extreme introvert” is so much simpler than “I got out of practice being around people and my nervous system now reads normal social interaction as threat.”

But here’s the thing: our brains are plastic. They change. We change them. What was true in 2020 doesn’t have to stay true forever. And I think this label—this box I’ve put myself in—might be limiting me more than it’s serving me.

The wider pattern

And I don’t think I’m alone in this.

I think a lot of us have accepted binary labels about ourselves without questioning whether they’re still accurate. Or whether they ever were.

I’m not a morning person. So you never try getting up earlier, even though your circumstances have changed.

I’m not creative. So you never make anything, because people who “aren’t creative” don’t do that.

I’m not sporty. So you’ve stopped moving your body entirely.

I need to be busy. So you never let yourself rest, because that’s “not who you are.”

These labels are comforting. They simplify decision-making. They explain why we do what we do. But what if they’re wrong? What if we’ve evolved past them, but we’re being held in place by boxes we put ourselves into years ago for reasons that no longer apply?

The standstill as invitation

This is why I keep coming back to the solstice. To that period when the sun appears motionless.

The sun appears still, but it has already turned. The physics have changed even though you can’t see it yet. That’s exactly the kind of moment when you can question what seems fixed.

Thresholds are good for this kind of work. The new year. A birthday. The start of a season. The solstice. Any moment that feels like a turning point, even if you’re the only one marking it.

A small experiment

Here’s what I’m suggesting:

Pick one binary label you’ve given yourself and gently test whether it’s still true.

Not to prove yourself wrong. Not to force yourself to become someone you’re not. But to gather information. To see whether this box you’re in is actually the right size, or whether you’ve just gotten comfortable there.

For me, it’s been deliberately putting myself into social situations I’d normally avoid “because I’m an extreme introvert.” Not forcing extroversion, but testing whether I actually need as much isolation as I think I do.

For you, it might be different:

• Try getting up earlier if you’ve decided you’re “not a morning person”
• Spend 10 minutes a day drawing if you’ve told yourself you “can’t draw”
• Do absolutely nothing for 20 minutes if you think you “need to be busy”
• Join a group activity if you’ve decided you “prefer to be alone”

Pick something that would be out of character for someone with your label. Something small. See what happens.

Give yourself a timeframe—the traditional twelve days works well, or a week, or a month. Long enough to gather real data, short enough to commit to.

Nothing has to stay fixed

The experiment won’t necessarily transform you. But it will give you information. You’ll know: Was that label actually true? Or was it just a story I’ve been telling myself?

Our brains are remarkably adaptable. Even in midlife, even after years of settled patterns, we can learn new responses. We can question old categories. We can discover that the person we thought we were is just one version of who we could be.

The sun stands still twice a year. But nothing else has to.

What labels have you given yourself? What would it mean if they weren’t actually true?