A few months ago, I quietly added a new page to the creative section of my site: ‘On Flipping & Reversing: Life Lessons from Creativity, Diversity and Women in Hip-Hop.’ This remained under construction for many months, presided over by the picture of Missy Elliott you can see above. While she held the fort, I was chipping away behind the scenes at the piece that has now been launched 🙂 It’s free to download at the link above, and the blurb there says more about its content. For this blog entry, I’d like to talk more about the creative process behind it.
Over the past several years, I’ve been privileged to help facilitate the writing of many people. One of the funny things about being a facilitator of this sort is that you can get very good at encouraging and receiving the creative work of others, but become a bit alienated from the experience of sharing your own creations with the world. Or perhaps your fostering of other people’s creativity, so fulfilling and meaningful in its own right, comes to supersede the nurturing of personal creativity. Both of these things had become true for me for quite some time, until earlier this year, when a reimmersion in Missy Elliott’s back catalogue sparked something. This was in parallel with starting courses in creativity coaching with Eric Maisel, which have proved to be not just amazing professional learning, but also a creative shot in the arm for me myself.
So, back in June, I started toying with the idea of a therapy blog post built around the phrase ‘I put my thing down, flip it and reverse it,’ taken from Missy’s 2002 song, ‘Work It.’ I was aware that my engagement with my blog here had become almost non-existent since 2023 and adding something new felt long overdue. As I started writing, however, the creative spark took on a life of its own, with the piece accumulating ‘multiple overlapping bridges between past and present, personal and professional, old and new and emergent.’ It became not just about the idea of flipping and reversing and how this might dovetail with therapeutic practice, but about me, my love of music, and the impact of artists like Missy on me at pivotal ages during my life. I had to check in with my teenage self in particular, around how he felt about me potentially sharing aspects of him that had never been revealed publicly before – the joys of mixtapes, night-time radio and trawling second hand record stores existing alongside fear and anxiety around his sexuality and place in the world. We found a way to capture these experiences that felt real but also safe enough to put out there, and I can look now at my creative responses to the challenges I was facing not just with tenderness, but also pride.
This me, and his experiences, now stand alongside later ‘versions’ of me that found further inspiration from agitating forces like punk and feminism. Weaving together all these Simons and the people and ideas they wanted to honour in the writing felt unwieldy at times, but we persevered and have created what I think sits as a cohesive-enough whole. Whether it does or it doesn’t, it is what it is and is happy to be here.
It feels very fitting that this same week that I launched this piece, I also bought my first CD in years – Rosalía’s fabulous ‘Lux.’ I’ve been a fan of hers for some time now, admiring her boundary-pushing instincts and alignment with artists like Björk and Arca that I’ve had longstanding relationships with. Aside from the music itself (‘Reliquia’ being a strong contender for my song of the year), that teenage me has been super-impressed by her advocacy for a return to a simpler way of engaging with music. From the BBC article linked above:
Ahead of the album’s release, the singer advised fans to play Lux on headphones in a darkened room, calling it an antidote to TikTok trends and viral videos.
“The more we are in the era of dopamine, the more I want the opposite,” she told the New York Times. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but that’s what I want.”
Buying albums and lying down to listen to them in full, with no distractions or interruptions, was such a huge part of my musical education earlier in life, but like so many people, in the age of streaming I too have become largely estranged from this most simple and beautiful of activities. ‘On Flipping & Reversing’ is partly about reclamation, and at this point in time there is something almost radical about what Rosalía is asking of her fans – to reclaim the act of immersing ourselves in one singular musical world for an hour, surrendering to what she and her collaborators have created. I’m curious to see what ripples may come from her entreaty. At any rate, sometimes it’s the case that we need to look back in order to move forward with a renewed sense of purpose or deeper appreciation for what’s important, and this feels in keeping with the creative process behind my writing too. I don’t know what path my creativity will lead me down next, but ‘On Flipping & Reversing’ feels like a meaningful flag in the ground along the way.
Simon
Nozomi Counselling & Psychotherapy 