Creatives: It’s Okay To Not Be A Total Mess
Why do so many creatives tolerate, even celebrate, dysfunction in themselves and the people around them?
Part of it, I think, is the mythology around the artist. Van Gogh’s suicide, Hunter S. Thompson’s binges. Such wildness.
No art without heart.
The figure of the artist, or, if we want to stretch and dilute the term, ~creative~, is wrapped up in assumptions about emotional chaos and the passionate extremities that fuel the creative process.
These persist because they are sort of party true. If you’re going to write anything interesting a doss of alienation is useful. You can’t just serve the mainstream back up to itself.
But, if we’re all being honest with ourselves, “creativity” is also a handy cop-out from the work of taking responsibility for ourselves. Routines and deadlines and hours wasted at the desk: that’s for other people, right?
I get to be one of the special ones.
… Don’t I?
not-interesting self-care makes possibly-interesting creative work possible
“So, what’s your fitness goal?”
The answer given is usually numerical: I want to loss X pounds, I want to lift Y weight. These are shorthands for vaguer, more complicated motivations, ones awkward to offer up to a gym foot soldier, usually because we don’t fully understand them ourselves.
Here’s mine: I want to create a space.
To clear an opening in the brush, where it is possible to be present and lucid, and do the work that needs to be done.
This means, first, accepting all my shit — the bad habits, the brain loops, the fuzzy heads — and then committing to a regular regime of self-care to manage, contain and get around said shit.
Which means early starts, and sobriety, and running, and weight training and experiments with — God forgive me — meditation.
it is so disappointing to realise the lame advice was right all along
I started writing film reviews after a depressive breakdown. They weren’t very good. Obviously.
Have you ever seen a depressed person trying to just, I don’t know, clean the kitchen?
Ask them for 600 words on the latest Polish indie.
Writing was an attempt to lay a path back.
One of the most hilarious misconceptions about mental illness is that it’s creatively useful — a source of juicy artistic angst.
The thing is, depression, the penny-common, everyday depression, the SuperValu depression, isn’t some Wagnerian internal maelstrom. It ain’t Tristan und Isolde. It ain’t mad Ahab splashing in the surf.
It’s a waiting room TV with the sound off, PVC Shopping on repeat.
It turns a person anonymous. It’s a creativity-killer.
So do whatever it is you need to do to get up and over to the other side. Even if you think it’s going to turn you boring. (It won’t.)
there’s the work, and then there’s the work before the work.
It’s the creative equivalent to a household’s “emotional labour”. This work is invisible. It doesn’t show up on the word counts and hours logged.
It’s essential background operation — the soft whirrs and purrs of machinery turning as designed.
So you abstain, and make the effort, and you make all these better, tiny choices, one after another, and, subconsciously, even if you won’t admit it, you’d quite like a camera crew to show up and present you with a big blue bow for Achievements in Adulting. But you don’t get one.
What you get is the chance to try.
What more could you want?
Conor is sick of twenty year old vloggers bigging up “the grind”. Lazy Creative is a podcast about creativity and self-improvement for those of us not buying the hustle propaganda. If it sounds like he just talked into his phone at the kitchen table, it’s because he did. #real
