Something I’ve observed more than once when working with people who rely on their creativity for their careers, is that as we reach closer to the sources of their distress and find tools that help them to cope and reframe more effectively, they become concerned for a new reason.
What if my creativity goes away?
In truth, many people link the symptoms of their concerns with the pathways of their creative drives. They believe their anxiety is what gifts them their attention to detail, or depression their eye for colors, or grief their ear for sounds. What is unfortunate is that this can lead them to pulling back from alleviating the symptoms of those concerns, or even idolizing them as acceptable costs for their creative skills.
It is important to note, though, that our distress concerns are not what grant us mystical creative powers. There is no font from which creative drive springs that is tied to your depression. It is true, however, that your depression can frame how you see the world. What changes when it is present is not the amount of creativity you possess, but instead, the mechanics of your observations.
Just as it can bias your mind toward paying attention to negative or self destructive contemplations, your listening to criticisms over commendations or appreciations, depression can bias you toward focusing on certain shapes, colors, or other aesthetic concepts. It can lean you into favoring sounds featuring minor or melancholic melodies, or even guide your transference or projection of ideas in situations.
Which is how comedy often gets referenced as a processing tool for things like depression or anxiety. The bias toward dark, self destructive, hyper-vigilant thoughts biases a person toward thinking styles that they transfer, project, or otherwise process in storytelling into humorous performances.
What changes for a person when they begin to work meaningfully on those distresses is their framing of things begins to change too. The biases guiding what they pay attention to shift. This can mean for an anxious person that the jokes they used to tell about being anxious don’t occur to them naturally anymore, or fastidiously tidying the lines of their doodles doesn’t seem as necessary.
It doesn’t mean their anxiety was the source of their creativity, it means the drives and biases underlying their creativity have changed. They are still a creative person, just one set adrift from what they knew as a commonly walked pathway for channeling that creativity because those framings no longer align with how they see their world.
Can that be scary for someone who relies on their talent for income or identity? Of course. But it isn’t the end of their creativity, simply a turning point away from one period of creative focus toward something new.
The challenge in this experience is opening the mind up to possibility, because letting go of what they were attached to is hard. Whether it was producing music, carving, baking decorative sweets, or any of the endless forms of creative expression out there, they can struggle with letting go of the idea that they’re supposed to keep doing that thing in the same way as before.
But in releasing their hold on this artifact of an old self, they gain the ability to begin to explore something new. Or many things new. The fear is in the challenge, the unfamiliarity of the new thing, but so much is gained in braving the new.
We learn who we are afresh when braving new challenges, and that experience can be the scaffolding upon which this version of ourselves, one who isn’t defined by their depression, anxiety, or other struggle, unfolds.
For more constructive reflections, tools, and processing guidance to assist you on your journey through the struggles you are grappling with in life, visit the contact form linked below to sign up for a free consultation call.
Sean Sparks Counseling 