Compositum from the Latin ‘to be composed’…

antonym:

• to decompose, compost, rot,

• to decay, to undergo a change, to fall, deteriorate,

• to be with the earth, to decline, to lose vigour.

All this just for a bit of rest…

Rest is a radical act of liberation from composure.

D x

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As I reflect on the natural sense of deep rest that is brought about by the impending winter, I’m reminded of the challenge we face, as we seek to undo the damage that has been done in generations before us, to women’s rights to rest. I wear the weight of expectation, I sense the suppression of needs, the suggestion that I remain bound and quiet. This year I will hold women before me in mind as I search for ways to free myself, and sink into a restful winter.

Thank you for following and subscribing to Care Collective by Danielle Jones through 2025. If you have enjoyed my essays and poetry, please consider sharing my work as I try to gain support and interest in my writing as this Substack grows.

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With gratitude and hopeful wishes as the light returns.

Danielle x

I’d like to offer a little bit of a reflection on the journey of writing that I’ve been on, and some thoughts on how demand avoidance can show up, sometimes to subvert my attempts to express myself clearly, but oftentimes to give me the creative boost I need to get words on the page…

I’ve been thinking about PDA and my creative approaches for a few years, and I am deeply involved in a thought based exploration, around how this shows up in my dance leading and choreographic work. For me, coregulation of the nervous system is an essential part of connection through somatic and movement practice and has been at the core of my dance career. What I hadn’t expected, was that the process of writing for Substack would be so illuminating when exploring my neurocomplex approaches to creating. In particular demand avoidance, and the deep need to seek nervous system regulation through autonomy, even from myself and my own brain.

Setting up this Substack, I had over 50 different ideas for essays, notes, and concepts that I wanted to write about and share. I have been gathering momentum slowly over a few years, building to the point of launching with a backlog of options to post about. All of these ideas are from my lived experience, all relate to my current deep special interests - neurodivergence, cocreation, parenting - and all are very fascinating to me. Yet I cannot write about these things easily. The list of ideas is such that the demand of getting to them is too threatening to my nervous system, and so far I have not written any of what I had planned.

However, I have been writing, a lot. Poetry mainly, but sometimes essays. Every time I write something, the content arrives via the backdoor, sneaking in and quietly slipping onto the page without demand. Poems fall fully written and unexpectedly from my fingers. Essays that I have managed to publish so far, are unrefined, unedited, usually written in one sitting as soon as the idea comes in to my mind (like this one). It occurs to me that these are the most real and immediate lived experience pieces of writing I can share. They slip out in the quiet moments of pause whilst the children are resting. The demand is low. I feel that I am simply in dialogue with myself on the page. There will be no re-reading, editing, or concerning myself with the detail. I will just post them and move on.

This is something that I notice about myself and my profile that I am learning to understand. To do something I often have to do it quickly. The best way I have found to decide on something is to limit my options. The best way to achieve is to take away the demand. I can pretend to myself that I don’t care about it, and then I can do it. As soon as I start to imagine an audience, critique my expression, begin to question the quality of it, the demands become too difficult for me and I shut it down.

This is not because I don’t care, it is the opposite. I walk around in this world caring so much about everything. To the point where the care itself becomes more prominent than the doing. In order to do, the idea has to creep in, a spark, so that I don’t have time to care so much that I stop myself. Because then in the caring comes the criticism, and doubt, often leading to shame. It has been interesting to reflect on this in other areas of my life too - the double edged sword of wanting to do something, but then caring about it so much that it becomes a huge and unachievable demand - currently leaving me seeking deep comfort and regulation above all other achievements in life.

I see that this is also linked to levels of nervous system autonomy and how much I am able to be my full self when my coregulation ability is being borrowed by other small humans every moment of every day. This has been even more prominent since my son stopped attending school. Somehow though, my brain is allowing me to use poetry writing as an incredible outlet for the trapped energy that I need to release.

Writing poetry through the back door has essentially been a way to take the thoughts and feelings that come up every day and express them in creative and expansive ways, that show the true nature of my creative voice. In dance I would not make work about the dark thoughts or complex ways I consider the macabre or existentialism, but in poetry I can inhabit the witch, the wild woman, I can exist as nature, speak through the mind of a child—I can allow my thoughts and spirit to fly in untold ways. I did not expect I would find myself writing poetry when moved (as I often am in the world!) but yet somehow this is the only thing that feels right to me now. It is completely low demand and requires very little from me. My thoughts and emotions arise, they come out on the page. I move some words around a bit, and then the poem is written. I don’t give it more thought than that, as I don’t want to stifle my own expression and get in my own way. I think ‘could this really be done’ but then the reality is, it is done because it exists for that moment. Another day I might have written it differently. Today I have written this and therefore it is done.

I think this is also a reflection of my desire to share process and insight into creativity, to remove the hierarchy of artist as genius and simply to share the thoughts as they emerge. There is no finished product in any art making. You have an idea, you make it, the product exists in that moment in time. If you tried to make it again it would be different because you would have more information and you would be a different person to the you that made it the first time.

This reflection in itself is really just an expression of a moment in time. I sat down to write this because I was thinking about demand avoidance and how it can get in my way. But in fact it allows me to get thoughts out with immediacy, whilst respecting that this is a process and not a product. I can accept that the knowledge that I’m sharing does not need to be refined as it is my lived experience and I know that more fully than any reference book could teach me. I find lived experience sharing the most valuable of all the reading I do on here. So I hope this piece might reach others who are grappling with the creative experience and give you permission to share things from the messy middle, and not worry about the polished outcome. Let the ideas flow in through the back door, perhaps he front door ideas will show up there one day, having realised that is the safest way in!

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Go gently into the darkest night.

Danielle x

In 2023 when my second child was born, the transformation that took place for me emotionally, spiritually, and socially, was even bigger. This time the reflection in the mirror looked soft, yielding, a warrior in different form. I felt like my power was not the same, it was an inwardly looking, reflective, care filled power. A gentle activism. My daughter’s arrival stopped me in my tracks. No longer capable of the functioning capacity I had pre children, her presence made me take longer breaths, slower steps, she brought me to a halt, and in the stopping I found a new voice.

Poetry started forming in my brain as soon as my son was born. The long walks to get him to nap with the rhythm of the moving pram, regulated my nervous system with the pulse of the steps and fresh air. From a regulated and spacious state I was able to allow my thoughts to turn to poetry in my mind. I was having to quickly jot things down as I walked or voicenote myself the ideas to complete later. At the time I was quite intrigued by this new skill that was suddenly erupting, it was exciting. Poetry gave me a creative outlet where dance was less accessible to me for many reasons.

I have been writing ever since, with more and more coming up in the last two years since my daughter arrived in my life and realisations of my neurodivergence flooded my matrescent brain. I’ve had to slow down considerably since she was born. Mothering two neurodivergent children, no access to any direct support, the navigation of a post partum identity metamorphosis, a lack of funding for projects, moving to a semi rural village in Oxfordshire, have all led to a much simpler pace of living. I have had to be kinder to myself about what I’m capable of, and often poetic writing has been the antidote to the funding applications, job applications, advocacy letter writing, Local Authority form filling - all the intolerable bureaucracy of life in the world right now.

My brain doesn’t stop. Despite my life feeling slower, it has been absolutely essential for me to continue to have an artistic purpose and to find somewhere to direct my racing, often intrusive, thoughts. So I was completely thrilled when I received an ACE DYCP Grant to honour this work and spend quality time investing in this craft.

I have spent this year joining in the incredible Monday night writing community and receiving some invaluable mentoring from Kirsty Jones, who continues to bring such insight and warmth to my Monday nights and has given me a way of carving out space for myself to practice (something that up to this point, as an artist in dance, I am only used to doing with my body). She put me on the path of discovery and I have been seeking more and more inspiration with the brilliant Verve Poetry Press workshop series which has given me further writing time and thinking space on a Tuesday. Highlights for me were Alice Hiller, Hannah Copley, Wendy Pratt, and Ella Duffy each making me think differently about my self, my voice, the natural world, and the things that mater to me as a writer and human being.

Finally, the grant enabled me to think creatively and holistically about how this new aspect of my work and life might sit alongside my practice and vision for my career moving forward. I have been incredibly fortunate to receive mentoring with Annie Ridout to help me carve this Substack space into one that can nurture all aspects of my writing. Poetic work can sit alongside autobiographical pieces, and musings on life and parenting, can sit alongside conceptual writing about the arts and co-creation, one of my deepest interests as a facilitator and leader.

The opportunity to bring meaning and life to the poems I have been writing, and to forge a platform for this work has been invaluable to me. I know that one of my best friends waits for my posts to come in each week and is my solo champion! But even if I had no readers at all, this process of putting words to page and reshaping my identity through writing does not need an audience. I am doing it for myself, for the rebuilding of my identity after the positive disintegration of the last few years. I’m really grateful for this opportunity and I am really curious and excited for what might come next.

Thank you.

D x

Next up, I will be introducing some really exciting work with Rosie Heafford of Second Hand Dance. This cocreative relationship of thought generation, a choreography of minds, has been generating exciting personal and conceptual understanding for us both into our artistic practice and leadership approaches, and I look forward to sharing more with you. Please consider subscribing to get the next piece straight into your inbox.

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