Currently Feeling: Like my antenna’s fuzzy 📡🌫️

I’ve been absorbing too much for too long. I didn’t realize how much it was costing me creatively.

Apr 30, 2025

Currently Feeling is a newsletter about noticing what lights you up — and building a life that lets that version of you breathe daily.

I write about creative health, personal replenishment, and beauty as a felt experience. Think: flower arranging on a random Tuesday. A solo coffee walk just because. The quiet thrill of catching yourself in a moment and thinking: Oh. This is what it means to feel alive.

Come for the aliveness, stay for the very real magic of paying attention.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how artists talk about creativity.

It started when I was on my Lenny Kravitz kick a couple weeks ago. Three words he said in his interview stuck with me: “I’m an antenna.”

“All of this music that I've ever done… is something that was given to me. I am not “writing it.” It is written and it comes through me. The entire process, the entire exercise, for me is a spiritual exercise because I'm exercising faith by waiting patiently for it.

- Lenny Kravitz

Lenny doesn’t sit down at 10 a.m. on a Monday and declare it songwriting time. He waits. He listens. He only moves when he hears something, whether it arrives in a dream or while he’s doing something completely ordinary.

Then I heard Chris Martin describe how songs come to him — often in the middle of the night. A Sky Full of Stars, for example, came to him in 7 minutes (!!) at 11:30PM.

Both Lenny and Chris make themselves available to receive their ideas and gifts.

This way of creating — the patience, the receptivity, the trust — has stayed with me. It feels like something true about the creative process that no one really talks about.

I’ve started wondering if more of us (maybe all of us?) are meant to experience creativity in this way. Not by forcing, but by tuning in.

We all have a built-in antenna

I’ve written before about how Human Design is my favorite self-knowledegment tool. According to Human Design, we all have a kind of sensory intelligence, or a way that we take in and process information from the world. Our own built in antenna (!!!).

My super sense is called Feeling cognition, which basically means I process the world emotionally first, not through logic or words.

(And no, that doesn’t mean I cry at every movie or spiral at every conflict.)

It means I absorb things deeply, often before I can explain why.

I feel places. I feel people. I feel the mood of a room before anyone says a word. I can walk into a space and sense when something is off, even if everything on the surface looks perfectly fine. Sometimes I’ll read something and my whole body reacts before my brain catches up.

This makes me a really good noticer — of nuance, of tone, of meaning. But it also means I can get overwhelmed quickly if too much is coming at me. I’m not just hearing or reading or scrolling; I’m taking it ALL in through my body.

(You can imagine what happens when I spend hours on IG or TT 🫣)

And because I also have a defined Ajna (my “mind” center in Human Design), as soon as I absorb something, my mind immediately starts trying to make sense of it. Meaning-making is automatic for me. I can’t not do it.

This is a gift, but also extremely overwhelming for me when I’m constantly consuming content, multitasking, and just living in a hyper-stimulated world.

The truth is, I didn’t realize how scrambled my internal signal had become because this was my “normal.”

As a kid, I’d go to school all day, come home, and do hours of homework late into the night. That was just how it was. In college and early adulthood, “fast paced” was the name of the game, being busy was glorified, and multitasking was the only mode of operation.

Even now, I’ll open a Google Doc to write, and within minutes I’ve switched tabs, checked my inbox, opened five Substack posts, skimmed a Pinterest board, and scrolled Instagram.

I’m taking in too much, too fast, too often, without any room to let it land.

My antenna is overstimulated and overwhelmed.

Which brings me to something I didn’t expect: I’m way more sensitive than I thought.

Hi, I’m a highly sensitive person 👋🏼

I used to cringe at the phrase “highly sensitive person.” It felt like code for fragile or dramatic; the exact opposite of how I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be strong, grounded, discerning.

I’ve come to understand that my sensitivity doesn’t make me less powerful. It’s not a liability. It’s a creative advantage.

I can feel what’s not being said. I can pick up on the energy beneath the words. I can sense what’s true, even when it’s still forming.

That kind of sensitivity might be quiet, but it’s not small. When it’s honored, it becomes a form of creative leadership.

It allows us to notice what others ignore. To give language to what hasn’t been named yet. To hold what’s complex and bring forward what’s trying to come through.

I’ve spent most of my life overriding that sensitivity. I pushed through noise. I tried to keep up. I trained myself to power through input because I thought that’s what smart, successful people did. But sensitivity isn’t the opposite of strength. It’s the foundation of discernment, creativity, and vision.

Turning off the waterhose 🌊

I don’t think I’m alone in this. A lot of us are realizing we’ve been flooding our own frequency.

Personally, I’ve been waterhosing my own antenna for… pretty much my entire life. I thought I was doing myself a solid by trying to tune in to everything. In reality, the more I consume/absorb the less creative I am.

So, I’ve been experimenting with something different. Not a digital detox or a shutdown. Just consuming less. Not to withdraw from the world, but to tune in and listen more carefully to it.

What that looks like in practice:

One thing at a time. No more stacking podcasts, texts, and scrolling. Just ONE. THING. AT. A. TIME. This is SO hard!!! I’m used to context and task switching like crazy. For example, listening to a podcast as I get ready for the day. Scrolling social media while “watching” TV or YouTube. Now, if I put on a podcast or YouTube video I’m focusing solely on that. Same with Substack posts or articles. Oh, and I’m trying REALLY hard to just have one tab open at a time.
High-quality inputs. Quality content over quantity. At first I thought I might need to cut out reality TV (which I love, lol). As long as it’s nourishing me, it’s okay. For example, I love The Amazing Race, but The Valley? Too much drama (and not the good kind).
Limiting the number of people I follow on social media: This is a big one. I was following 500 people on TT and almost 400 people on Instagram. That’s wild!!! I cut my TT following down to 50 and am working on getting IG down (I’ve cut it in half so far). I’ve noticed my screen time is down since I’m not keeping up with as many people so that’s made a huge difference already.

These little (okay, big) steps are helping me be more available to myself, to the world, and to whatever is ready to come through.

If your creativity has felt a little foggy lately, maybe the answer isn’t to try harder or work faster or try the latest “hack”.

Maybe you just need to understand how your antenna best receives its signal and do what you can to protect it and keep it clear.

Because let’s be honest: the clearest ideas don’t come from grinding. They come from listening. Clarity isn’t something you chase. It’s something you receive.

Curious what your own “super sense” is?

I’d love to help you find your Human Design cognition — it’s one of the most helpful things I’ve learned about myself lately. Leave a comment and I’ll point you in the right direction!