Exploring Creativity, Queerness, and Coming Out

We all have an inherent capacity for creativity, but queerness and creativity have a special connection. This week In the Den, Sara sits down with creativity coach Liz Heichelbech to discuss how to explore, claim, and live our own authentic lives.  Navigating true self-expression in the often challenging waters of cultural and societal norms and expectations can be a powerful catalyst for creativity. Sara and Liz dive into how creativity shapes our stories, what power art holds in the coming out process, and why queerness and imagination are so deeply connected.

Special Guest: Liz Heichelbech

Liz Heichelbech is a creativity coach, educator, author, and artist. Originally a professional contemporary and classical dancer, she earned her BFA in Fine Arts Studies from the University of Arizona, and a Masters in Education from Lesley University. She holds Massachusetts state teaching certifications in Dance, Theatre, and English, and taught in the Weston Public School district for over 20 years. She was a creative collaborator in her role as Instructional Coach for five years at Weston Middle School, and was the facilitator for Weston Secondary New Teacher Mentor Program for ten years. Liz was the former artistic director of Women’s Improv Group Boston. She has taught creative workshops at Tucson Medical Center, Rainbow Lifelong Learning, Weston Arts and Innovation Center, Waldron Center for the Performing Arts, Bloomington Council on Aging, and with Joy Point Solutions. She is a recent graduate of the Martha Beck Wayfinder Life Coaching Program, and is a member of the Creativity Coaching Association.

Liz’ first novel, Chopin in Kentucky, was published by Bluemoose Books in 2023, and she is currently at work on the sequel, Lost and Found at the Canary Cafe. Her first adult coloring and creativity workbook, Start Where You Art, was published by Literary Kitchen in 2024. Liz believes in the restorative power of creative play in writing and the fine and performing arts. She knows well how to help others access, respond, and transform their ideas, feelings, desires, and dreams. Using a blend of life coaching techniques, personal inquiry, and guided, process-oriented creative structures, Liz is on a mission to inspire others and help them align with their most essential selves.

Links from the Show:

• Liz’s website: https://www.creativeincites.com/  
• Join Mama Dragons here: www.mamadragons.org 

In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you. Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today at www.mamadragons.org. 

Transcript

SARA: Hi everyone. Welcome to In the Den with Mama Dragons. A podcast and community to support, educate, and empower parents on the journey of raising happy and healthy LGBTQ+ humans. I’m your host, Sara LaWall. I’m a Mama Dragon myself and an advocate for our queer community. And I’m so glad to be part of this wild and wonderful parenting journey with all of you. Thanks for joining us. We’re so glad you’re here.

Today we are talking about Creativity. While we all have an inherent capacity for creativity, I believe – regardless of what some art or music teacher once told you – queerness and creativity have a special connection. To explore, and claim, and live one’s authentic life in any identity, navigating true self-expression and experiences of marginalization in these challenging waters of our cultural and social norms, all of these experiences can be a powerful catalyst for creativity.

So, today, we’re sitting down with Liz Heichelbech. Liz is a writer, artist, and the brilliant mind behind Creative Incites. And she’s here to talk with us about the beautiful, messy intersection of creativity, queerness, and coming out. Liz brings a unique perspective on how self-expression can be both a lifeline and a lightning bolt helping LGBTQ+ folks, their families – and all of us, really – navigate identity, authenticity, and the courage it takes to step into your full self. We’re going to dive into how creativity shapes our stories, the power of art in the coming-out process, and why queerness and imagination are so deeply connected.

And I should tell you, Liz is a long-time friend of mine who has taught me so much about my own creativity and creative expression. She is one of those people who inspires creativity in everyone she encounters. Just being around her makes you feel creative in all kinds of different ways. And she also has a knack for finding the joy in everything, even in the most frustrating circumstances. So I am particularly excited for today’s conversation. My dear friend, Liz, welcome to In the Den.

LIZ: Thank you, my friend. It’s a pleasure to be here.

SARA: I am really excited to have this conversation for public consumption. You and I have talked about creativity in all kinds of strange ways over the years. But I want to start with what seems like perhaps an obvious question – though I suspect your answer may be different than the one many of us think about. What is creativity exactly? How do you define it in your life and your work?

LIZ: Creativity, to me, is being willing to find the game of things, because when we detach from outcomes and when we detach from rules or the way that we’ve always done things, and when we detach from limiting beliefs that we might not even know we’re carrying with us, the playing field opens up and so much becomes possible. So that, to me, is what creativity is. It’s wisdom through creative play. And embedded within that is joy and freedom.

SARA: Now, see, I knew you would have a different answer than maybe most of us think about. So I’m sure that a few of us were thinking about creativity purely in terms of the act of creation, like creating a physical piece of art, for example. I think all of our brains go there. But you’ve just opened this idea up to be way bigger than that.

LIZ: Well, I’m very much process-oriented. So when I teach art-making as a self-care modality, it’s really great if the product is pleasing. But that’s not where all the 12 essential vitamins and minerals are. To me, it’s about what we learn from the process of engaging with creativity. And I think that’s what most people are after. When I have a coaching client who comes to me and says, “I started a book and, you know, I put it down and I just need someone to hold me accountable! I need somebody to help me finish this product!” I know that probably underneath that, what they’re really after is the joy of engagement with this activity. And what they probably need is support and encouragement and conversation around that, and not really a task master, because most of us have a task master that lives within us and they are alive and well and we don’t really need another one.

SARA: That’s amazing. I am curious to learn, though, how did you discover – for lack of a better word – your own creativity? What role did it play in your young life, in your growing up years?

LIZ: That’s so interesting. So I am really lucky, I feel, in that I grew up – well perhaps we all do, perhaps we all grow up with a lot of paradox – but paradox is a really fertile breeding ground for creativity. And one of our premier researchers of creativity, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote more than one book about it and studied it, talks about several sets of paradoxes that prime that creative pump. And so he studied really pioneering and iconic people in different domains of creativity and discovered that they all embody paradoxes such as – and this is where queerness can really come to bear – you belong and you don’t belong. You know the rules and you internalize the rules and you defy the rules. So there’s a whole set of paradoxes that you can read in his book, The Psychology of Creativity and Flow. And so I grew up with one parent who was very much about product and classical art. We grew up on classical music. We had books about paintings, of course, dead white men, all of them. Right?

SARA: Yes.

LIZ: Then I had another parent who was very much about folk music and folk art and Joan Baez and experimenting and playing around with storytelling and playing around with paints and what they do. And so I got the best of both of these worlds. And that paradox really, really helped me. Not only because paradox drives a creative temperament and a creative mindset, but because the classical side developed a literacy of artistic expression. And the folk, more experimental side, exposed me to a literacy of process.

SARA: That’s so interesting. And I love that. And I’m curious because, I know your story and part of your early life, you were a professional ballet dancer in a ballet company. And so as you’re talking I’m thinking, “Oh, how did that creative Liz, who had lived with all of this paradox and had lived with this difference, did you find yourself pushing against the classical rigidity of the ballet world?”

LIZ: Very much so, and in fact, in some ways, I was a very slow learner because I danced professionally for a few years laboring under the delusion that it was a creative career. But for me, it was sort of the opposite of a creative career. There was some self-expression, but my talent was never elevated enough to be a soloist. So my job was to conform and fit in with all the corps de ballet dancers. And that was really hard for me. And in fact, I’ll never forget one time, I was in – let’s see, what was it – I believe it was a classical story ballet. It was probably Coppelia or something like that. And I was just emoting and expressing all over the place. And the director, who is this lovely woman from the Royal Ballet of England, stopped the rehearsal and came down from the light booth where she was sitting and took me aside and said, “We need less from you.” And that was the moment that I knew.

SARA: I’m thinking about your earlier statement about these paradoxes and how they relate to queerness and also oftentimes, how queer folks, particularly young folks – but I imagine it happens for adults who are coming out – “We need less, be less, you’re too much.” And I know that you also identify as queer. And so can you talk a little bit about these paradoxes in creativity and did that have an influence on your own understanding of your identity and in your own coming out story?

LIZ: So, to me, coming out, it’s so scary because you’re defying other people’s expectations of you. And you’re defying cultural norms which is always terrifying. It’s an existential threat to us. When I was a ballerina, I was surrounded by gay men. But I didn’t know that I was gay. I don’t know what I thought. I was so enmeshed and steeped in the culture of ballet and femininity and what ballet meant, that I had no clue. And it’s really interesting because, for me, my first coming out was quitting ballet because I was defying all of the expectations of my teachers and my colleagues, and even myself. I really struggled with the process of making that decision to quit ballet because it had always had the ring of inevitability to it. So shortly after I kind of woke up and realized, this is kind of like being in a beautiful drill team, and it’s not creative for me. And I started experimenting in all areas of my life. I jokingly say that I got my hair amputated. And I started experimenting with identity and with how I dressed. And I tried the flying trapeze. And I tried Butoh which is this Japanese artform that has nothing to do with the shapes your body is making in space and everything to do with your internal motivation and what needs to be expressed. I mean, I just started experimenting. And that experimenting led me to exploring my sexuality as well. And that was a huge awakening for me. And it was very freeing, initially, because my definition of myself was being expanded. So it felt very freeing. “Oh, I don’t have to be this thing. I don’t have to exist in relationship to the so-called opposite gender.” I mean, it just opened up so many possibilities and so many ways of being in the world. It was really empowering. Now, coming out is never a one-time thing. Just because you come out, doesn’t mean you stop coming out. I’ve had to come out many times. And some of them were terrifying. And you know, we come out in many ways. We don’t just come out as queer. Any time you are defying cultural expectations or societal norms, or you surprise yourself or the people that you’re in relationships with, that’s a potential coming out. And to make matters more complicated, we don’t just contain multitudes as Walt Whitman famously lyricized about. But those multitudes are always freaking changing. So never stop coming out. In fact, I remember one time in my life where I went sort of back into the closet and experimented with dating men again. And my queer friends were not happy about this. So it was like coming out to my own marginalized group.

SARA: Wow.

LIZ: Now, ultimately, I realized that I just wasn’t as comfortable in a heteronormative relationship. I never really felt like I could be all of me, for whatever reason.

SARA: And there’s the intersection with creativity as you’re talking and I’m listening to you talk about defying cultural norms and expectations in all manner of ways, particularly in our sexual orientation, gender identities, queer identities. There’s something about that experimentation and that seeking of one’s truest self that is also extraordinarily freeing and liberating. And that is a very creative act. Like creativity, I’m hearing you say, leads to or is a pathway to that sense of personal freedom and liberation and feeling like you are in your own true authentic life.

LIZ: Mm-hmm. And there’s a lot of responsibility in that freedom. And frankly, there’s some terror.

SARA: Say more about that.

LIZ: Well, any time we are walking away from culture, there’s an element of: “Where are the guardrails, now? What do I stand for? How will I be reflected in the people around me and the culture and the society around me?” Up until very recently, we – in this country who are queer – have created our own culture. And that has been a place to belong. So that’s been our sanctuary and our safe place. And so that goes back to Csikszentmihalyi’s embodiment of paradox as priming the creative temperament because we both belong in our own subculture and don’t belong in the heteronormative culture. But, of course now, we’re being called to act with more courage than ever because that culture – our subculture, our safe space – is being targeted.

SARA: Yes. And I’m also thinking about how even in those subcultures, the human tendency is to create your own norms and expectations. And in this current understanding of queerness and the big spectrum, I think there’s some push happening in those areas that actually even in our own queer subcultures we’re pushing against what some of those expectations might be and those binaries that were created. That to be queer back in the day is to be gay or lesbian. To be trans is to identify as the opposite sex rather than all of this understanding of the in-betweens.

LIZ: The in-betweens, yes. And fundamentalists are deeply terrified of in-betweens because it’s complicated. Even within lesbian culture, at one time you were butch or you were femme. And a relationship consisted of a butch and a femme. And it’s much more nuanced than that, as we now know.

SARA: I’ve heard you talk about how art and creativity can be a kind of lifeline for anyone. I know that you have held it as part of your own life’s vision and pursuit of creativity. And so I’m curious if you can talk about that in the context of this conversation unfolding around queerness and identity and both the terror of having to go against cultural norms and the freedom, and how being one’s true self, and where art and creativity can be an anchor and a lifeline.

LIZ: It’s interesting because the image that comes to mind is the rainbow and the rainbow flag, right, which is an emblem of queer culture. And it’s color. And it’s line. And it’s such an embodiment of our expressions of gender and sexuality. And it is visual. We know from cave paintings that early iterations of our – more or less – current humanhood ritualized the making of art. There weren’t artists. There were people who documented the hunt or documented any number of things. And it was a ritualistic tribal part of being human. It was how we expressed. So we are wired to express. We are still wired to express, despite the fact that our very left-brain-driven culture currently is very uncomfortable and probably in many ways doesn’t even recognize that that is a universal need because we tend to commodify everything, right? So if we say, “I’m going to take a bath. That’s part of my self-care routine.” We don’t say to that person, “Well, are you any good at it?” Right? But if you say, "I've taken up drawing,” then the question immediately becomes, “Well, what are you going to do with that? Are you good at it?” Or if you’re a writer, “Oh, have you published anything that I would know?” So we have this very outcome, commodification orientation to creativity. And we also have a strong attachment to creativity as being artistic. So we kind of gloss over the fact that creativity can happen and should happen in any domain, including gender expression and sexuality.

SARA: You talked earlier, I think where you were expressing a little bit about this idea that you mentioned earlier of creativity of self-care, as a modality for self-care. And detaching it from consumerism and capitalism and product and perfection and all of that as a modality of learning to understand ourselves or some kind of self-expression.

LIZ: Yes. Yes. Yes.

SARA: Can you share a time in your life when creating something helped you process your own identity or experience?

LIZ: Oh my goodness, so many times. So for me, the reason why I find it so affirming is because creativity is a literacy. There’s identifiable skills. There’s identifiable processes, different models of understanding creativity. And when you become literate in those skills, in the skills of process, you become literate with yourself. You become literate with the thoughts and stories that are hiding underneath our motivations for doing things or our emotions or our procrastination. And so when you find ways to express your creativity, you complete the cycle. We are made to express. So think about a young person who is questioning their identity, questioning their gender, or questioning their sexuality, they may be “costuming” themselves to play a role. And they may be really scared of starting to experiment with how they express. But when we express, we complete the cycle. So we tend to be afraid. Take what’s happening right now in our culture which is deeply scary for many people watching what we are familiar with and what we always thought was going to exist forever being dismantled right in front of our eyes and having no idea what to do to stop it, not knowing if we can do anything to stop it. So we’re living in constant fight-or-flight as do many young people who are questioning their identity. And if we don’t express, then we don’t complete the cycle and we stay in that adrenaline-flooded zone. And we’re headed straight for adrenal burnout, right? So it doesn’t matter how you express it. You can run down the street and that’s a discharge. But the discharge is what’s important. That energy has to be expressed in some way.

SARA: And creativity, self-expression, is a healthy form of that expression.

LIZ: Yes. Yes. And this is why learning, experimenting with artistic pursuits is a convenient modality for exploring your creativity. It doesn’t have to be artistic, but a piece of paper and something to mark with, that’s a whole universe of possibilities. So if you know how to hold a writing or drawing instrument and drag it across a piece of paper, then you already possess the basic building blocks of creating a world. Remember how a new box of crayons would make you feel as a kid? I mean, we were as gods, right, of the universes we could create. So, I advocate for exploring a modality that is artistic because it’s such an easy way. I call it an art-venture. It’s such an easy way to engage with our right-brain side, our intuition, our deeper truths of who we are, and play with it.

SARA: That whole conversation kind of just blew my mind as I’m thinking about stress and overwhelm and in this current moment that so many of us are facing – many of us parents, our kids, our beloveds – and frankly, as one who lives and practices in a world that uses the term “self-care” a lot and who attempts to get at this from a different perspective, it did not occur to me that creative self-expression, that liberatory, free, creative self-expression in whatever form it might take, is a way of processing the stress and the overwhelm or the grief or whatever it is that is coming up for us and how important and how much that is needed in the way that life is unfolding right now.

LIZ: Yes. And it’s never been more needed or more important because, when we doom scroll, we are passive consumers of culture, right? And kids are scrolling constantly about “What is gender, what does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be a man in this culture? What does it mean to be heteronormative? What does it mean to be wired differently?” So they’re passively consuming culture, too.

SARA: Right.

LIZ: And when we’re not active creators of culture but rather just passive recipients, our amygdalas are totally hijacked because there’s been no discharge. There’s been no expression of all of that passive consumption of input.

SARA: That’s a lot right there. I’m just taking a minute to take that all in. That’s a really incredible frame.

LIZ: It’s interesting because I have found that, for my sanity, I have to limit my consumption of information because I can’t be a light for others, I can’t be an inspirational creatrix if I’m hijacked – if my amygdala are hijacked by the enormity of what is happening in our country. And so it’s not that I’m advocating that people should stick their head in the sand. I’m actually saying the opposite which is, “If we care for ourselves by creating – maybe in community or maybe on your own, whatever you feel the call to do – that’s actually going to make us more able to participate in democracy, to be an active citizen.”

SARA: Yeah. What would you say to folks, particularly queer folks, who often have the experience of being told their self-expression, their experimentation into that self-expression, is too much? How do you encourage folks to stay with that creative instinct? I’m sure you’ve heard those words a few times in your life.

LIZ: So many times. I heard over and over again, “You think too much,” which is probably true. “You try too hard,” which is also probably true. Yep. “Too fast. You’re going too fast.” All of those things. But wisdom traditions always try to guide us towards our inner compass, our inner morality, our body compass, our ways of navigating that we know to be true regardless of what the culture is reflecting back to us. And I always think of creativity as deeply spiritual. And in that way, it’s a wisdom tradition.

SARA: So there’s a sense of honoring your own learning to hear and then honor your own inner wisdom.

LIZ: Yes.

SARA: Whatever creative form it takes, self-expression, art, movement.

LIZ: Right. And especially because so many of us have art scars. As you were referencing earlier in our call, right? What are my art scars? I call them Art Bolts.

SARA: Because even in prepping this episode, folks on my team were talking about, “I’m not creative.”

LIZ: Of course. So I find that often that “I’m not creative” chorus is driven by one of two mindsets. And one mindset elevates being creative to a special chosen few, which is part of that commodity systems mindset. “Well, I don’t do that and I’m not good at it, so no. I don’t do that.” Conversely, sometimes there’s a feeling of creativity and art, “That’s for children. That’s play and I don’t do that.” So in both cases, there is a distancing as a safety measure. It’s a defensive stance. “I don’t do that. I don’t need to take creative risks so I can protect my ego and my identity and not disagree too much with cultural norms.” And that’s understandable.

SARA: Of course.

LIZ: That’s very understandable.

SARA: Culture is a heavy hand in our lives, all different forms that it takes, our societal culture, family culture, religious culture. And it’s really hard to see outside of that sometimes.

LIZ: It’s a good servant, but a bad – I hate to use the word master because that word is loaded – but culture happens. We need it. It just happens. It’s part of the human experience. And we need to be able to honor our own integrity even if it diverges from the social compass, the social, the cultural definition of what is integrity.

SARA: You just talked about the connection to play. And I know that you personally use a lot of play and humor in your work and in your coaching and in your life. Why are they so connected to this idea of creativity, and why are they so important?

LIZ: Such a great question. That calls to mind the image of the oxymoron, the wise fool. There is a certain kind of wisdom that arrives through creative play. And in fact, some would say that that is where insight comes from because we learn by experimentation. And that’s what play is. I sometimes joke that what I do is “I offer soul work with a sense of humor,” because if soul work takes itself too seriously, we become rigid again.

SARA: True.

LIZ: And “What does it mean to be a spiritual person? What does it mean to be a creative person? What does it mean to be a progressive person?” right? And so soul work with a sense of humor acknowledges that creativity is a wisdom tradition, but that play is the path through which we engage with it.

SARA: That’s beautiful.

LIZ: and so everything I know about healing and about growing creatively comes from this sense of improvisation. So one thing that I’m doing right now is I’m teaching an applied comedy improv class where a group of people get together and we play collaborative improv games and then we reflect on “What was hard about that? Where did you surprise yourself? How can you carry that into other areas of your life?” Because there’s a certain ego-death that has to happen with improvisation. And that’s where all the good stuff is.

SARA: There’s a certain ego-death that has to happen, at least as young adults, adults, as we’re transitioning into adulthood around play, because we’re just told that that’s not acceptable anymore.

LIZ: That’s true. Yes. That’s true.

SARA: “Unless you’re one of these special people who gets to do it for this particular, professional, commodified reason.”

LIZ: Right, you’re either a child, so you get to do it. Or you’re an elevated professional.

SARA: You’re a stand-up comedian or a dancer.

LIZ: Yes. Exactly.

SARA: And so I know this has been an orientation for you for a long time.

LIZ: Right.

SARA: And earlier in your life, you were also a middle school teacher and an instructional coach for many years. And all of this wisdom and creativity and play really found its way into that profession. And I’m sure that you encountered young people grappling with their identity and queerness, and teachers grappling with how to support students. How did you bring this orientation to creativity and humor and play into that work, into that environment? What would you tell those kids and those teachers when folks were coming to you with those questions?

LIZ: Well, it’s evolved over time because cultural acceptance has evolved over time. I’ll never forget the first time I ever came out to a middle school student. I was terrified. This was maybe 2013. And we were on a field trip. We were on a field trip to this lovely place where kids can do challenge-by-choice in nature. So there’s ropes and there’s trapezes and there’s climbing things, and there’s all these different things. And we were sitting having lunch. And it was a day of connection and authentic conversation. So one of my sweet students, we were munching on our sandwiches and he said, “Mrs. Heichelbech – I wasn’t married at the time, but if you teach middle school you're always a Mrs. – Mrs. Heichelbech, what does your husband do?” Well, first of all, I was really surprised because so often the world of being an adolescent is so tumultuous that it can be hard for adolescents to focus on the adults around them. They’re so focused on their emerging selves. So I was kind of surprised. And so I had a moment of like, “Oh god. Oh god. What do I say? What do I say? What do I do? What do I do?” Just a simple question, “What does your husband do?” So loaded. And so I said, “Well, actually she’s a she and she works at a software company.” And there was silence. And the young man then said, “Oh. What software company?” I was just like flooded with relief. I was like, “Oh, thank god. And we’re back to normalcy. This is amazing.” And that was such a moment of fear and bravery and then expansion. And so something simple like that as just being honest in the moment, at some risk – some perceived risk at any rate – in the situation. A friend of mine, a lovely coaching friend Kellen Becktold – she may be quoting either Martha Beck or Elizabeth Gilbert – but she says, “There’s no such thing as one-way liberation.”

SARA: Right.

LIZ: And so that’s a really, really lovely ethos to hold and to share. “There is no such thing as one-way liberation.” And so when we allow ourselves to be real and we allow our students and our adolescents to be real, everyone is liberated by that. Just as when one group is targeted with fascist thinking, it becomes less safe for everyone. We had, at my school, we had a GSA, a Gay Straight Alliance. I think they wanted theirs to be called Gender Sexuality Alliance. And we started that because the students asked for it.

SARA: And were you an advisor for that?

LIZ: Yeah. And then we had a spin-off group. I started the art club at my middle school. And we had a lot of customers from the GSA who came to art club because it was a safe place where they could do expressive work.

SARA: As it should be.

LIZ: And a lot of rainbows happening in art club, let me tell you.

SARA: In this world when we’re trying to oppress the rainbows, we only need more of them.

LIZ: Yes.

SARA: So what advice would you give someone, let’s start with a younger someone, who wants to come out but is struggling to find the right words or the right moment, who's really at that threshold. And I’m thinking, how could creativity help?

LIZ: Well, my first instinct is to share my experience with that student or that young person. And my second impulse is to get them connected with a group of like-minded kids because if they know they’re not alone, it becomes much easier to be courageous in expressing who they are. So getting that group affiliation could be really important. And if there isn’t a GSA, let’s find an art club because we’re always well represented in art clubs . . .

SARA: That’s true.

 LIZ: . . . because that’s a place where you are free to express yourselves.

SARA: In all kinds of alternative identities, I feel like the artistic community often leans or maybe the door is wider to welcome all kinds of different, alternative forms of expressing self and identities in the world because it’s so tied to creative, artistic expression.

LIZ: That’s right. And I would say, try and find an art group that is more focused on process and expression than on “Learn how to draw this tree representationally.” – Which is still better than nothing. But, again, now we’re focused on being good at it.

SARA: Right. You do a lot of this work. You talked a little bit about your coaching practice. And I know you recently started your own business as a creativity coach. What made you decide to want to move in that direction? And what people have been asking me as I’ve been telling them about this particular episode, is “What does a creativity coach do?” I think we’ve heard a little bit already, but give us the rundown of what does that look like in terms of what you offer in your business? But also, when you’re coaching one-on-one, who do you work with? What kinds of things do you do? What kinds of programs do you offer? And to what end?

LIZ: Well, it is a work in progress, let me tell you, because I am learning every day. I recently graduated from Martha Beck's Wayfinder Life Coach Institute, which is named after a mode of orienteering that Polynesian kayakers use and have used for centuries where they navigate by the ripples in the ocean and the position of the stars. And they have no instruments. They have no compass. But they travel thousands of miles, via kayak, and know how to arrive at their destination. So it is a way of following your intuition, your deep observation skills, and your own inner compass, your own inner orientation. So I am wayfinding my way through “What does a creativity coach do and what do I as a creativity coach do?” So what I like to think and express in my coaching practice is that I help people discover who they really are. And going back to the fact that we contain multitudes and those multitudes are always changing, I do a lot of work that references internal family systems because we have so many different parts of us. And if we can get those parts talking to each other, we become much less bound by our limiting stories and our limiting beliefs that we don’t even know we’re carrying with us. And so for me, creativity is a means to do that, to do that work. Now, creativity means different things for different people. One of my clients right now that I’m working with is a person who used to be a dancer and now is learning about being a fine artist. And so we do a lot of play and experimentation with detaching from product, detaching from perfectionism, and playing with the materials because that’s the best way to learn what they do. So that’s a client who is a creative, self-identified creative. I have another client who doesn’t really, maybe didn’t see herself as creative but had always wanted to write a children’s book. And so she thought, “Who am I to write a children’s book? I don’t even know anything about children’s books. I don’t know anything about publishing. I’m not a writer. And how am I going to illustrate it? I do collage. I can’t illustrate with collage.” So we are working to engage with the joy of the process of working on it because that’s how we stay motivated. We don’t stay motivated by “Oh crap. I told myself I’d have a first draft done by X date.” I mean, that might be motivating to a taskmaster part of ourselves. But if it doesn’t feel good . . .

SARA: It doesn’t help the creative self come alive.

LIZ: Right. And I’ve worked with people who want to do spiritual work through creative processes. I’ve worked with people who wanted to write poetry but didn’t know where to start. I’ve worked with people who want to learn how to do comedy improv and they don’t even know why? They’re terrified. Right? And I’ve worked with people who just feel like life is blah. I’ll quote Nick Wilton here, “Art gives us something to go crazy over so we don’t go crazy.”

SARA: That’s brilliant.

LIZ: But for me, even just having a conversation, a coaching conversation, is creative.

SARA: Oh yeah. For sure. And you’ve been hosting some online group sessions, yes?

LIZ: Yes. I offer, on first Fridays, I offer an “Art Instead Happy Hour.” And I called it Art Instead because art is a really positive habit that can replace doom scrolling, over eating, over drinking, over thinking, over consumption on screens, etcetera, etcetera. And so we gather and no – absolutely no talent is required because talent is overrated in my opinion to begin, with but also art is for everyone – So we might start with a scribble. And then turn the scribble into something. Or we might start with a task, like we might push a penny across the page with the marker or the pen just to see what kind of interesting lines that we can draw. And then we build on that to create an abstract design. It’s just about making marks and joining in community because curiosity, creativity, and connection are antidotes to how a lot of us are feeling right now.

SARA: Yeah. Antidotes to overwhelm. And also, I’m looking here about, we’ve talked before about antidotes to anxiety which is so prevalent in our culture today and is really prevalent in our queer community and understandably so. I mean, I think about the anxiety crisis that younger people are finding themselves in these days.

LIZ: Oh, gosh, my heart goes out. My heart really goes out to young people and everything that they’re dealing with. One of the great benefits of engaging with any kind of creative process is that it helps us get more cognitive and affective agility. And that’s exactly what young people need, especially young people who are questioning their identity or questioning their orientation or their sexuality or how they express it. We need that fluidity, that agility, so that we don’t get in that fixed mindset that tells us, “Well, I can’t be that. I can’t be that. People don’t like that.”

SARA: Yes. How can parents, educators, caregivers help nurture children and young people’s queer and creative sides, especially for those that might still be thinking, they don’t see themselves as creative or artistic? Though, after this conversation I hope that everybody understands that we all are.

LIZ: It’s a birthright.

SARA: But what can we do for ourselves and for the young queer people in our lives to help nurture creativity and expression?

LIZ: My number one go-to is to game-ify it. Play drawing games. Play color matching games. Have a “Who can draw the ugliest drawing” game. Draw with your non-dominant hand. Draw with your eyes closed. Play comedy improv games. Anything. It’s about play, right? It’s about gamifying all that we hold so serious.

SARA: That’s great. That definitely speaks to young people and this culture of gaming and gamification to just use that.

LIZ: And, whenever possible to do it in real time, not with an abstract screen but to do it with real materials and real people and real-time laughter because what you’re modeling is vulnerability. Right?

SARA: Yeah.

LIZ: You’re modeling the courage to be a wise fool, the courage to be vulnerable, the courage to express and reveal. One reason that I feel a little bit broken-hearted sometimes about our young people, is that often enthusiasm can be viewed as social suicide.

SARA: Yes.

LIZ: Right? Unless it’s about something that’s sort of culturally endorsed.

SARA: Correct.

LIZ: So enthusiasm, that very word is about embodying God, the inspiration of God, right? And Theo is where it comes from. So talk about a wisdom tradition, allowing people to be enthusiastic. That is a form of vulnerability. And vulnerability is a scary thing to express in times where fundamentalist voices – and I use fundamentalism, not necessarily in a religious sense but in a philosophical stance – that things are right or wrong, black or white, and clear and simple.

SARA: That is a beautiful way to wrap up this conversation. I love the idea that any of us, all of us, can nurture our own and each other’s enthusiasm.

LIZ: Me too. And I love how you just summed that up.

SARA: And that being a form of creativity and self-expression: nurturing enthusiasm.

LIZ: I love the word nurturing.

SARA: I’m going to take that away with me into my day and my week. That’s really a beautiful source of wisdom. I have some final questions for you. And these are final questions that I like to ask all of my guests.

LIZ: Okay. Shoot.

SARA: And the first one has to do with the Mama Dragons name. Mama Dragon's name was created out of a sense of fierceness and fierce protection, particularly for our kids. And so I like to ask my guests, what is it you are fierce about? So, Liz, besides creativity because we got that today, what else are you fierce about?

LIZ: Well, laughter. I’m very, very serious about it. Laughter, what did Kierkegaard say – “Laughter is the narrow escape into faith.” So I’m fierce about laughter and soul work with a sense of humor. I’m fierce about spirituality, whatever that means to an individual person and the freedom to explore and express that. I’m fierce about truth-telling. I’m fierce about playing games. I’m fierce about the wise fool. And I’m fierce about the fact that liberation is never a one-way street.

SARA: Beautiful. And my final question is, what is bringing you joy right now, knowing these times in particular we really need to access those places of joy? What is bringing you joy?

LIZ: Conversations like this one. I have recently replaced some of my doom scrolling with bloom scrolling. I just look at pictures of really interesting, beautiful flowers. I’m a terrible gardener, but I love flowers so much. And just looking at them makes me happy. So that brings me joy. Coaching, doing creativity coaching brings me so much joy. Working on my books brings me joy. Painting brings me joy. And connecting to the people in my community is a lifeline for me right now.

SARA: Well, Thank you. Thanks for being with us and talking with me. This conversation has brought me a lot of joy. Always a beautiful way to move into the day. I’m so grateful for you and your work.

LIZ: Thank you. And I’m so grateful for you, too, and this podcast.

SARA: Thank you. Thanks so much for joining us here In The Den. Did you know that Mama Dragons offers an eLearning program called Parachute? This is an interactive learning platform where you can learn more about how to affirm, support, and celebrate the LGBTQ+ people in your life. Learn more at mamadragons.org/parachute. Or find the link in the episode show notes under links.

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