Creative permission

The year my daughter turned nine I decided to make her a cake in the shape of a dinosaur.

Every year I bake her a cake, the thought of buying one instead never even entering my head. That’s because it feels like baking the cake myself is an act of love, one worth more than anything money can buy.

But it’s not a perfect act, that’s for sure. The memory of that dinosaur cake will linger on in my mind for a long while yet.

The shape was, thankfully, recognisable as a dinosaur because I wisely aimed for one of the more obvious ones with a long neck, like the brontosaurus, a former member of the sauropod family. Unfortunately, since the year of my homage the poor guy has been reclassified as an apatosaurus, so I’m glad I could do my bit to preserve his memory.

This was going to be a purple dinosaur cake.

It was not.

The best description of the final outcome would be grey sludge.

And I say final outcome because on the way to grey sludge there were quite a few other outcomes, each overridden until I decided to admit not defeat, exactly, but acceptance that this was how it was going to be. Plus, the birthday party was imminent.

This is the cake, out of all of them, that I remember the most. There have been others since that were actually pretty good, beautiful even, but which I can barely recall.

The sludgy dinosaur? I think of him fondly.

I long ago gave myself permission to bake a cake that might not turn out as I would have wanted. And just as well, because it turns out that my amateur cakes are where creativity lives.

And giving myself permission to bake them when I always know there’s more than a fair chance they will err on the side of the brontosaurus rather than something from a magazine, is what makes this creativity possible.

I’ve thought about this a lot within the context of my music studio, too.

Lessons would be unforgivably joyless if getting everything right all the time were the goal. And they would also be unproductive. I prefer an environment in which the people who come to me can be not just themselves, but their unashamedly worst selves.

Because this, I believe, is the best environment in which to learn.

Learning not just the ins and outs of music and creativity, but also how to give themselves permission to make mistakes, play around, throw their hands up in the air and laugh, and limp to the end of a song trailing a blaze of wrong notes.

None of this might be what they think they’re signing up for, but all of it is crucial to them becoming not just comfortable enough to embrace being challenged by me but also able to comfortably challenge themselves.

If you’re too scared to put a foot wrong, taking any step will feel almost impossible and you can almost forget trying to take in anything you see on the way.

When the making, of a cake or music, becomes what matters more than the result, then something opens up.

For my younger students it’s rarely a thing.

They’re mostly open to trying whatever I ask of them, are always immensely satisfied with the outcome simply because they created it, and keen to see what might happen next.

For my adult students it can take a while, and I can see the battles going on in their heads. Expectations battling with reality, and the lure of freedom from those expectations battling with their fear of losing control.

But as soon they give themselves permission to embrace that freedom, no matter the consequences, they find themselves with space to think, to question, to experiment. Even better, they’ll eventually be able to not just look to me for answers but also work out some for themselves.

For my birthday this year my husband made me a cake. Chocolate, delicious, a little bit wonky, imperfectly perfect in exactly the best way.

And made with love.