I'm an ideas volcano

Red hot and spewing creative thoughts quicker than I can process them.

Photo by Daniil Silantev on Unsplash

I have too many ideas. My brain is spewing out excitable thoughts about everything, and I’m struggling to keep up. It’s not a bad place to be, granted, and I’m trying hard to keep up and write down fragments so that when I inevitably find myself in an ideas tundra, I’ll have some material in the bank.

Perhaps it’s logical to have this sudden outpouring after freeing myself from a job that was sucking so much of my energy and enthusiasm. Maybe this would have happened regardless. Who knows?

One of the main sources of these ‘idea eruptions’ is the topic of my podcast. I had no intention whatsoever of starting a podcast, and then a couple of weeks ago I saw an article written by the page ‘On Substack’ about podcasts. It spiralled from there, and now I can’t stop thinking about it.

I wrote about the subject of the podcast last week; read it here if you missed it:

Women take risks too

Anyway, back to the ideas volcano.

I signed up to

Daisy Buchanan

’s workshop on Sunday morning on the topic of starting a podcast and, during the 50 minutes or so that I sat in front of my computer screen, it dawned on me that making a podcast was the obvious thing for me to do, not least because I:

a) know how to edit audio and have the hardware and software for it;

b) am a composer, by training, so could also write music to feature in the show.

Sound is kinda my thing. I seemed to have forgotten that.

On Sunday afternoon, I found myself scrabbling around in the cobweb city that is our loft, hunting for my old midi keyboard (a music keyboard that connects to my laptop). I gave it a serious dust, and connected it up. Within minutes I was writing a theme. My office space is now a complete mess due to hunting for keyboards and cables and microphones. I would say that this mess represents my lava brain perfectly and I wouldn’t change a thing about it!

Part of the motivation for my podcast is to delve into what allows women to be creative in their work. Many, like me, had followed a career path that they were told equalled success.

“Work hard, go for the promotion, aim high.” they said.

This ambition is satisfying for a while, until you realise that the aspects of you that make you unique and interesting are slowly being chipped away at by some invisible force. The liberation felt when the shackles come off and the woman is freed to unleash her creative brain is electric.

I hope you are as excited as I am because, let me tell you dear readers, I have some unbelievably inspirational and talented women lined up to feature. Recording starts very soon, and I hope to publish the first episode in October.

Have you had periods of time where your creative thoughts were unstoppable?