How some artists are able to sink deep into depression and be more creative than ever before I will never be able to understand. I am the absolute opposite. If I am sad, depressed or struggling I feel completely disconnected from all sense of creativity and I am barely able to produce the bare minimum of content. I am basically a zombie doing things without feeling or sense, merely because I have to.
I need to be happy – at least to some degree. I guess, I need to not be unhappy. The happier I am, the more creative and productive and efficient I am. When depressed, I can barely function. When I am happy, I am soaring almost effortlessly through even the most challenging work.
You see, being happy to me doesn’t mean I have no challenges or no difficulties, it just means I have the vitality to deal with it. I can be happy and struggle with a challenge, or I can be unhappy and feel the defeat before it has a chance to happen. When I am happy, no matter my personal struggles, I feel almost like I have a connection to something greater than myself – crazy as it might sound to some.
Pain makes me feel disconnected, fractured and isolated. I am not saying that those experiences haven’t been good for me, I have learned so much about myself personally, and as a creator, that I could never have realised or understood otherwise. I am more me now than I ever was before, but it doesn’t mean I am more creative or productive. I doubt it makes me able to become more creative or productive in the future either, although it does probably change how and what I create throughout my life.
That whole tortured artist thing always seemed so sad to me, and I couldn’t help but wonder if those who can create during such periods are actually somehow happy being unhappy, but I feel it might be rude to all those who have suffered and made beautiful art, writing and whatever other creations, perhaps as an outlet for their pain.
Some of the most amazing people seem to have been just such creatures. I respect their work very much and, even though I wish they could have been happy and created what they did, I understand that it might not be possible. Those artists are more than I can be, I am aware and honestly grateful for their strength and hard work. I have no need to be the most amazing writer to walk this earth, I am sure that I could never be that. I don’t want to be. What I want, more than anything in the world, is just to be happy – even if it means my creations will never reach the level of those utterly consumed by their creations.
I just want to be happy. When I am happy, I find writing to be one of the most wonderful things in the world. I love creating stories, imagining new worlds and characters, who all get their own life almost separate from what I desire of them and the world that I have placed them in. When I am sad, I can barely imagine how I get through the day and have no space for characters to live and grow. When I am sad, anything that brings me joy only reminds me how sad I am and I pull away from it, feeling the absence of happiness more acutely than the pain itself.
You may be able to tell, if you look back on my work on this blog these last few years that I have struggled. I am almost grateful you are unable to see the amount of unfinished fiction and posts I have lying about my room in drawers and cabinets on random pieces of paper and little notebooks. I have not stopped creating simply because I have been sad or in pain these years, only my work has been a scrap of paper here and there, a few pages in notebooks and maybe a few half-hearted sketches or drawings.
I cannot stop entirely, even when I suffer the most, but most of it gets stuck in my head and I struggle to get it out. When I try, it is like I am trying to cut my own heart out. Was it Hemmingway who said something about writing being an easy thing, that you just sit down and bleed? I think it must have been. In any case, it just fits the way I feel when I try to work through the filter of pain.
Now, I do have a point to all this. I love being happy and I love to write and creating. There’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t want a fancy house or lots and lots of money, I just want to work doing something that makes me happy, so that I can spend my days creating stories or writing about my life and autism spectrum disorder on this very blog. I want to do what I can to help others who have struggled, or who still struggle, like I have and still am. I don’t need a lot, I think. I used to think I needed more, but it wasn’t what I needed, but just something I thought I wanted.
A few years back I was in a relationship with a someone who was very bad for me and treated me so very poorly that I ended up thinking it would be better if I died. Then I left, because I realised, I wanted to live – and I still do, more than I ever wanted to live before. Then the pandemic hit. The actual day I left with two big, blue Ikea bags filled with my most important things and came back home to my mum’s house, the whole country closed down and we all had to stay home. I got really sick, lost my sense of smell and taste, suffered all the usual symptoms both physical and cognitive (years later and I am still struggling to get better, and my sense of smell and taste is still not fully back either) and this happened just a few weeks after starting a new job in an entirely new field – I switched from humanities to software development.
My point is, I have been very unhappy for a long time. I feel increasingly happier, however, and I can feel this need to be more creative again. It’s not a vicious circle, but maybe sort of the opposite. I feel a little happier, then I can be a little bit more creative, which makes me feel a little happier – a virtuous circle (is that actually a thing or am I making it up? Or using it in a way you can’t in English? In any case, it should be thing). I am not happy yet, but I am doing my best to become happier.
I didn’t really respect my limitations in the past – the specific limitations here being that I just am not able to work when unhappy.
I would force myself to write a little and hate what I had done, because it didn’t really come from a place of light, but a place of darkness. Recently, my focus has been more on trying to find myself and figuring out who I am, what makes me happy and unhappy and how my creativity best flows.
Honestly, all I really want is to write, but as long as I am studying and working I might have to accept that I cannot do all that I want to do. I know most people got over coved-19 by now, but I am not one of them. I am still sick more than 3 years later and because of that, I feel I have less life to live. I suffer from many of the symptoms still, fatigue and memory problems being by far the worst of it. I feel like I am trying to fit in enough stuff for two lives, while only having the ability to live half a life.
What it really means is that the life I have is more important to me than it was before.
My contract at work finish in little over a year and I have already found a possible job that will allow me to work less hours than now. I will also have finished all my courses by then, so I hope that even if I am still sick, then I will be able to start spending more of my time doing what I truly love instead of working more hours than I am actually able to, studying or feeling guilty not studying.
I don’t need a lot of money to survive, I just need enough to pay off my student loans and pay my monthly bills, which means I am not worried about the fact that less hours of work will mean less money – I am working as an apprentice and don’t earn much as it is. I feel like everything will be fine.
This period of time will not be my happiest or my most productive period, but I will try and be as happy as I can possibly be, so that I can write and improve my skills even just a little during this time. After all, I have a pretty good life as it is and I feel it will only get better in the future – in spite of the difficulties I also see ahead of me.
