Sparking Something
Feeling Inspired
Most of us need somebody else to notice first. You can do a thing for years without believing in yourself, until someone with no reason to flatter you says that you’re really good at this.
She came up from London to study and knew almost nobody. “I’m by myself,” she told us, “so there’s not much community.” Taking a gap year, she’d started volunteering at HOME, and one of her shifts happened to be on the women’s group’s own art exhibition. Somebody there mentioned the group to her, so she went.
Her first session began with a dance, then small groups and a playful exercise with people she had never met. “I felt very free and reconnected to my younger self, being in a space where I could explore and create with new people.”
A self-consciousness settles on most of us as we get older, and with it a resistance to anything spontaneous. A lot of what Home from HOME does is simply hold a room where that reservation can be put down for an hour. She described leaving sessions “feeling rejuvenated and joyful”. “It’s almost like a seed of creativity,” she said. “It waters something and makes me feel inspired.”
The seed, in her case, was writing. She already wrote, but not as much as she wanted to.
“Even with writing, I didn’t realise how much of a talented writer I was until being there and participating. I didn’t acknowledge that before, but it’s nice when someone else sees that.”
And then the part that explains why a room full of near-strangers could do what the people closest to her hadn’t: “I didn’t always have that acknowledgment from people close to me, hearing it from others is very validating.”
The group made a piece of theatre together and she performed in it, drawing on her own experience to build her section. “Turning my experiences into art was very alchemising.” It was not comfortable. “I was nervous, when performing, but I went with it. There was some imposter syndrome, but I pushed through.” She stood on one of our stages, and found something she hadn’t expected: “Being on stage helped me overcome a fear of being perceived. It’s exposing, but in a good way.”
Watching the audience react changed what she thought was possible. “It felt impactful and inspiring. I would love to perform more. It’s definitely sparked something in me.” She has also decided she wants to write scripts now! But “there’s no pressure,” she says. “It’s about doing it out of love.”
Seeing Black women making work and holding space for themselves is, in her words, “quite rare and refreshing.” But what’s rare here is the opportunity - a free room, a professional artist, and enough weeks in a row for somebody to pay attention and tell her she was good at it.
Talent is everywhere. Opportunity isn’t. Opportunity is the part somebody usually has to pay for.
She came to HOME as a volunteer, feeling lonely and without community, but she became a participant, found a community, made something that moved a room full of people, showed it on our main stage, and became inspired to continue on a writing path. She isn’t somebody passive that we reached. She’s somebody who now shapes what gets made here.
She comes back to the same image of the seed - “Inspiring, like planting a seed, igniting, something brewing.”
“Funding is important so more people from underrepresented backgrounds can access these opportunities.”
If you’d like to help more people feel inspired, you can find out more about Home from HOME’s goals for its final year here.