“The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there”
~Ernest Becker
There are countless blogs and articles out there sharing what it is like living with mental illness, all much more noteworthy, focused and inspiring than anything I can come up with (and probably better written with correct grammar). For this reason, I haven’t started this blog with the intention of focusing on my mental health. I’m not a writer, and I’m happy to leave it to the people who can articulate it with justice. However, my state of mind plays a major role in my creative process so if I am going to share my creative journey I can’t avoid writing about my experience with mental illness to some degree.
As I work through my current depression, I’m starting to wonder if these periods aren’t linked to my creative process. Last year I read ‘Denial of Death’ by Ernest Becker, and his explanation of the difference between the creative person and the neurotic person rung painfully true to me, as it no doubt has for countless other people. He explains that the ‘creative’ and the ‘neurotic’ both suffer from being painfully aware of the realities of life. The difference is that while the neurotic person takes it all in and holds it, the creative person will chew it up and spit it back out in the form of their chosen art, meaning they release it while making sense and taking ownership of what they experience.
These dark times are the detours in the road to creating. They are often even sparked by an inability to create due to lack of time, space or technical ability, so it makes sense that these are the moments I would be overtaken with neurosis as my experience has no outlet. However, on the other side of these depressions, to date at least, is a leap in my self awareness, my understanding, and my creativity. My detour hasn’t ended in the madhouse yet, but the time that I stay there is always painfully unpredictable.
If I take what Becker wrote as truth it is no wonder that I have caved into a depression. I have started a commission where I am trialling new things, I have started trying to promote and live more congruently with my creativity, and am experiencing a surge in my skills and technique. The problem I face is that I can’t live in my creativity 24/7. I have to work, especially if I want to keep funding my artistic endeavours. I also have social wants and needs, as introverted as I am. In classic mental illness style, these areas of my life simultaneously hinder recovery, aid recovery, and are impacted by depression, making them difficult to balance even when I am at my best.
Do I need to keep repeating this cycle to elevate my creativity? Is there some subconscious drive in me to find the depression in me and feed it because I know it will lead to a creative leap? If I figure out how to bi-pass the detour, would I still experience depression? I feel like this is so deeply hard wired into me, both biologically and socially, it could almost be destabilising to try and find the answers… is it better to just let these cycles keep going, or am I aiming to push myself into the madhouse?
“The artist takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art.” ~Ernest Becker
What a great quote, how full of potential. It is the kind of quote that empowers and plucks at those cords in the heart that want to believe. Can I really do this though? Like, REALLY do this? Can I train myself to pick up a pen when all I want is to go to bed? To paint when I feel like all I can manage is sitting a dark room to numb my thoughts? Maybe I can do it a few times but it is like an addiction- I can hold it at bay but sooner or later my urges overcomes any good intention. Can I persist through the countless, inevitable failures until one day I instinctively take the world and rework it instead of detouring?
I suppose the answer is that I have persisted for this long through all the failed attempts, but I have still not failed.