In case you missed it I’m hosting a reflective arts workshop in Birmingham on Saturday. If you’d like to join us, there’s still time to register on eventbrite!

At the beginning of the year, I made the commitment to myself that I would practice creating in public with my back to the audience.

By this I meant that I would do more public creative work, but I would be less influenced by others as I did it. I would treat my art as if I were the conductor of an orchestra who doesn’t turn around to face the audience until the composition is complete.

So far this practice has been going well. I’ve started writing poetry again, I’ve started playing keys again, I’ve been writing more about creativity, I’ve been making visual art, and I’ve been sharing more of it both online and in-person. I’ve been able to preserve the authenticity of my creative life and in many ways it has felt like I have come back home to myself.

One thing I didn’t anticipate however, is how much this creative commitment would end up influencing other areas of my life — particularly my work and my writing.

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A couple of months ago I started a new job as a suicide prevention therapist. As my caseload grew I started to notice particular themes that were coming up across clients. Between my sessions, I began working on a model of suicidal crisis based what I heard in the therapy room. I wanted to capture my clients experiences both conceptually and visually so that I could better understand the difficulties they were going through.

Usually, I would have just keep the model to myself. It was something I worked on because I found it fun and interesting. It was my own personal project, another creative activity to do on the side.

Even if I thought would be useful to others, the fear that people would perceive me as arrogant would have rang in my head and stopped me from sharing. You’ve only just started here and you’re trying to change things? Are you saying our existing models are not good enough? Who do you think you are coming in here with these ideas? They’re not even any good!

In this case, I decided to push past those voices and share what I was working on with my colleagues who encouraged me to share it with our director. It was a simple thing but I felt proud after I did it.

When I look at it now, that was my creative commitment in action. I was letting myself create something publicly in the workplace and refusing to let the perceived opinions of others stop me (and of course, nobody actually thought I was arrogant, they all thought it was quite interesting!)

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I knew that my creative commitment would influence my writing but I didn’t anticipate how. I thought I would find myself writing more experimentally and playing with poetic forms, but instead, I have found myself experimenting with more traditional essay structures.

I have spent some time unpacking that with myself and I have realised that it is partly because now that I am not in academia, I feel more free to experiment with it’s format.

It’s a simple example, but before, I was afraid to use headers in this newsletter because I associated them with academic writing. In my mind, to use headers you had to be writing as some kind of expert and I was waiting for the academic Gods to bless me with the intellectual authority to use them.

Now that I am free from academic pressure and I’m not writing papers trying to score a particular grade, I feel more free to incorporate academic style and content into my writing. It has felt like a weird shift but at the same time it has felt more natural. It feels like my philosophical and intellectual voice have more room to breathe. Writing feels like less of an effort and I’ve been able to start writing my posts in advance because I’m flowing more easily through my thoughts.

Before, it was like I was writing in front of a little panel of academics who were judging everything I did, and so I protected myself by writing in an explicitly creative voice. Since I’ve turned my back on them, I’ve been able to reclaim my intellectual voice and recognise that it is inseparable from my creative one.

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I’ve updated my creative commitment now from just ‘create art in public with your back to the audience’, to ‘live life in public with your back to the audience’. Now, it is about giving myself permission to authentically create whatever and however I feel led to in whatever space I am in.

It is a deliciously liberating task albeit a slightly daunting one, and what the past 6 months has shown me is that it is definitely not an easy one. It requires a level of accountability and a constant discerning of what things should be shared publicly and what things should be kept private.

It is also challenging to remain true to the work despite the applause. As I have been sharing more online and in real life, I have been attracting new audiences and new people have started engaging with me. The temptation I have felt is to begin reshaping the work around them in order to keep them engaged. I have had to keep reminding myself that the conductor does not alter the composition as new people enter the room. All the conductor does is keep their eyes on the song.

That’s what I have to do too, keep my eyes on my song.

Hi, thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed reading please like, share or drop a comment sharing your reflections — I’d love to hear your thoughts and your engagement helps encourage me to keep writing!

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Until next time,

Mica

I’ve been facilitating workshops for the past 3-4 years but these are workshops I’ve been hired to facilitate as a freelancer or workshops I’ve delivered as part of my job.

At the start of the year, I felt that this was the year I should start to organise my own public workshops, but I knew I didn’t want them to be generic wellbeing, mental health or arts workshops. I wanted to create a workshop that would be fun creatively, but also provide a space for where people can pause and check-in and really connect to their lives.

I had the idea to run seasonal workshops — workshops based around the seasons that act as checkpoints in the year where we can take a pause and reflect on what’s happening both within and around us, because we don’t often have the time to do that. Life moves so quickly and we move with it, a lot of just ‘get on’ doing the things we need to do and we either miss celebrating a lot of great moments, or miss the opportunity to acknowledge the small moments — not realising we’ve missed both until it shows up later in some way through stress or low mood.

As we have the summer solstice coming up this month, the first workshop is Postcards from Spring on the 20th of June and it is all about slowing down to reflect on the past 3 months of Spring. You can find the details and the description in the flyer below.

My hope is to run similar workshops exploring different creative formats throughout the year at the seasonal checkpoints – the autumn equinox, the winter solstice, the spring equinox.

For this session, I wanted to focus on postcard-making because summer is the time people are often going on holiday. It felt appropriate to have a session where you can create a postcard that captures the essence of the past few months of your life that also carries a message to yourself that you can carry with you into summer. These can be stuck to your fridge, placed in a wallet, stuck in a scrapbook — whatever will feel the most meaningful to you.

If you’re a creative person, a reflective person — or just someone who wants a low pressure wellbeing event to get out to and connect with others, then I would love you to join! Tickets for the workshop can be purchased on Eventbrite here. They are priced at £14 and cover the cost of the event.

Feel free to also save the flyers above and share with people you know who may be interested.

See you there!

As I went through the process of making the collage however, I began to recall and identify more of the other roles I’ve been in. The roles from my very first job as a ‘crew member’ in a local McDonalds, as a waitress in a Wetherspoons through University — all of the freelance jobs I’ve had as a poet, a writer, a facilitator.

By the time I had arranged all the titles and work related images, I had a new sense of grounding. I realised that the title ‘psychologist’ was not the centre of my professional self. It was just one thing among many.

Collage and integration

In the psychological — namely Jungian — context, integration is the act of bringing different parts of the self into a unified whole. It refers to bringing unconscious or rejected parts of the self into conscious awareness, and integrating them into the conscious self i.e. the idea we have of who we are.

Before I made the collage, ‘psychologist’ was the only role I consciously associated myself with and the other roles I had lived were floating somewhere behind me in the dark. I had so completely cut off the memory of working in McDonalds that I had forgotten I ever did, and when the memory came up, I found it so embarrassing that I didn’t want to include it in the collage. There was so much shame around that period of my life because of how much working in McDonalds was seen as ‘lesser’.

It was interesting then, that when I let myself recall the memory, I realised how fundamental it has been to my professional life. I don’t remember how long I worked there or even how old I was (possibly 16?), all I remember is that one day my manager was disrespectful to me and I decided to never go back. That was the first major decision I made about my working life and it was foundational to my professional identity because it determined to the values I wanted to live out in my working life.

I recognised in that moment that I wanted more for my life and being there and treated that way wasn’t going to help me towards it. I recognised that I didn’t want to accept being disrespected in the workplace and that is a boundary that I have held throughout all my jobs that has oriented me towards working in great teams that hold the value of mutual care. There was also the recognition that me working in that space in the first place was evidence of my drive to want to improve my life — and that drive has always been with me as a core part of who I am.

As I sat with the memory of that time I shifted from being embarrassed of that version of myself to proud. I felt able to include the role of ‘crew member’ in the collage and allow that story and the values it held to be a part of my new self-concept. I could accept that part of my life as part of my identity in a way that I couldn’t before — along with all the other parts of me that I had previously rejected because I didn’t feel they weren’t significant enough.

Through the collage, I went from seeing my professional identity as ‘psychologist’ to seeing it as ‘therapist, researcher, writer, poet, facilitator, teacher, team member, spiritual care person, someone who is driven, someone who values supportive work cultures, someone who enjoys doing arts-based work’ etc etc.

I had been able to break down my old identity and begin to create a new one that was based more on values than titles and created an inner feeling of wholeness.

Collage and alchemy

It seems to me that while creating my collage I moved through the phases of alchemy that Jung identifies as reflecting psychological processes.

These phases include nigredo (the breaking down of psychological structures and confrontation with unconscious parts of yourself), albedo (the clarification and differentiation of what has emerged), and rubedo (the integration and reorganisation of what has emerged into a unified whole).

It seems to me however that I not only moved through these phases, but that I moved through them because the act of collage making specifically facilitated it, because these phases are intrinsic to the art of collage itself.

When making a collage you start with existing pictures and then you cut them up and break them down into fragments (nigredo). You then spend some time clarifying your pieces and your arrangements (albedo) and then you re-organise the fragmented pictures and integrate them so that they create a new whole (rubedo).

In this way, collage itself seems to reflect the underlying psychological/alchemical processes I was going through, and as such was the best art form to express it.

Other art forms

As someone who often floats between art forms, I find myself wondering whether another art-form could have facilitated this same psychological process and I am inclined to say no.

In other art forms you start from the darkness i.e. you create out of nothing. You have a blank canvas. A blank page. Empty sound. You might take inspiration from somewhere, but you are starting from nothing and your art emerges from that place of nothingness. With collage you don’t do that, (most of the time) you start with existing images that you deconstruct and then reorganise to create something new (the only thing I can immediately think of that’s similar is DJing or complex music production, in which case those could be considered to be collages of sound). The process of collage is transformation before creation, not just creation, and that’s where the difference lies.

Usually when I feel something that needs creative expression I ask, how would you like to be expressed? Through song? Through poem? Through painting? Through story? I let the art determine the form and perhaps collage was chosen in this instance out of the intuitive sense that something in my thinking needed to be transformed rather than just expressed, out of the sense that something in me had been deconstructed and needed to be put back together — out of the sense that whatever that something was, it needed to be seen.

It’s not to say though that because I’ve made this collage the inner work is done. It’s not as simple as making art, going through a psychological process and that being the end of it. The psychological integration still needs to be lived out, I still need to live out whatever it means for me to exist outside of this psychologist framing I’ve been in the past 10 years. To be honest it’s hard. It’s much easier to experience a psychological change than to embody it, but that is what I’m practising at the moment — living out this process that started on the page with some old pictures, magazines, scissors and glue.

Selah.

My immediate response was no, I’m more of a writer than a visual artist, but he didn’t pay much attention to my protest and kept encouraging me to submit something.

A week later I ended up submitting a 3 part visual line poem titled ‘Taste the rain’. It was inspired by listening to people complain about how much it has rained since the year started. It made me think about the ways we forget to find presence and joy in small things – about the fact that we’re waiting for the sun to enjoy the day, and forgetting that there was a time when we could find joy in the rainy days too. I was reminded of the way in which we used to catch rain on our tongues as children and how much pleasure and presence was contained in that small act.

Those reflections became the foundation for the piece and summed themselves up in the line that became the poem. For the visual elements, I made simple images out of card and arranged them as collage pieces. I wanted the images to be as simple as possible to reflect that spirit of childlike presence, though it took some time to determine the specific images and arrangements I wanted to go with. When I had finally finished and it came time to submit, I almost talked myself out of it because I didn’t think it was good enough.

It doesn’t fit the theme well enough

It’s too simple and boring

Anyone could have made this there’s nothing special about it

It’s too amateur

I had to return to my mantra for the year of ‘creating in public with my back to the audience’ and remind myself that it’s my job to make the work, not to judge it. So often as creatives you can compare your work to others or count yourself out because you’ve determined it’s not good enough but you do yourself and your work a disservice when you do that — and the audience too. You assume you know what everyone else is going to think when you don’t. You’re not a mind-reader. You have to allow other people the opportunity to experience your work and decide for themselves what they think.

I’m so glad that I didn’t listen to that voice telling me not to submit because now the piece is showing in the exhibition for the rest of the month. The opening night was on Friday and it was such a moment to see my piece up there alongside other peoples works, to see the different ways in which we all responded to the theme.

If you’re in the area, please check it out and all of the other pieces in the exhibition – there are some really talented artists featured!

In my own life, I have decided that I will run towards the goal of creating more, publicly.

‘Create in public’ has positioned itself as my 2026 mantra as I’ve been thinking about my relationship to art. Since my psychology doctorate fell away and I had that identity crisis where I realised that I’m actually a creative person, I have been seeing more and more just how much creativity is central to my world. For my whole life I have been treating it as if it is secondary, but it is in fact the most primordial part of me. It is the undercurrent of everything I do, the thing that is always there running beneath everything else, and just like anything else that humans become accustomed to, I have taken it for granted.

I don’t want to do that any more.

I want to embrace it and see what happens when I let it lead.

As part of my commitment to ‘creating in public’ I am challenging myself to share more of my creative life in this newsletter. To lean into experimentation and produce less curated pieces, to share more creative processing, more philosophy, more poetry, more essays, more notes and less perfectionism. I’m thinking of sharing more reflections on exhibitions I’ve gone to or books I’ve been reading or projects I’m working on or artists I’m speaking to. To just write and hit publish rather than obsessing over narrative coherence.

My friend told me that she finds the story-reflections the most engaging format of writing I do, and as someone who also enjoys reading I understand that. There’s something about the immersive quality of them, the ‘here and now-ness’ of them, but I feel the flicker of a flame in the direction of a more expansive forms now and I intend to follow it.

I feel conscious that I will alienate my readership because of that but creative practice has to evolve and it’s one of the challenges when you’re creating anything. You want to produce things that engage the audience but you don’t want to be dictated by them. You don’t want to turn your back on what the audience likes in order to grow, but if you want to create anything honest as a creative person you have to.

This is where the second half of the 2026 mantra ‘with your back to the audience’ comes in.

There was someone online who described it like being the conductor of an orchestra. A conductor directs the music so that the audience can enjoy it, but they have to turn their back to the audience to do so. If they face the audience they’ll get distracted by a multitude of micro influences: a facial expression interpreted as distaste, a glance at a phone interpreted as boredom. They’ll start trying to please the audience, trying to adjust to the culture, trying to adapt to the trends. In the end, that would only kill the music. For the music to stay both alive and true, both conductor and audience have to be facing towards it.

My commitment for 2026 then, is to be the public conductor of my own creative life, but to turn away from the audience while I do so. Just like the painter has to face the canvas and the writer has to face the page, I will turn my face towards creative practice in all my favourite forms.

I will let creativity become my focus and let it become the mainstream instead of the undercurrent. Hopefully, the audience that finds me will find that the creativity flowing through my life is flowing through theirs too, and in the end, we’ll all be found together, fire-horses drinking from the river in the heart of the sun.