And sometimes we do everything we can to put it off

The other day I was telling a friend about how I was worried that my creativity might be born out of angst, and now that I wasn't feeling so depressed, I was afraid that I might no longer have the inspiration to create. In response, my friend told me that my creativity came from my soul, and then the next day she sent me a link to a book called, 'the Van Gogh Blues, The Creative Person's Path through Depression' written by Eric Maisel. As I read the excerpt I had tears streaming down my face. It hit a chord.

I started thinking about how writers, painters, and anyone else with an artistic temperament spend so much time gazing at our own navels. Daily we confront the question of whether or not what we do is valid, is it meaningful, is it worth our effort? Each of us has a general idea in our head of what is valid or meaningful work, and we hold that up as a goal we want to accomplish, a judgment stick that we use to measure ourselves by. When we happen to have a day, or two, when we are unable to accomplish something that forwards our goal, we get depressed, thinking we are unworthy of calling ourselves writers or artists. But we are our own worst critics. By putting judgment pressure on ourselves to perform at the high standards we hope to achieve, we are in effect stopping ourselves from achieving our own goals, and that creative slump that's got us feeling depressed only seems to become longer and longer, the more we criticize our inability.

If you think about it, what is it that we are creating anyway? For most writers, it's just a file on a computer. It doesn't have any consequences unless we decide that it has. We could spend the whole day writing gobbly gook and it wouldn't make any difference one way or the other. We'd just have to do some editing when we are more on top of our game. Writing gobbly gook is much more preferable to writing nothing at all, much better than staring at a blank page hoping for inspiration to strike and getting depressed if it doesn't. Who knows, there might be a few gems buried within our desperate ramblings, or we might just forget ourselves and lose ourselves to the creative process once more.

The thing is, we have to give ourselves the freedom to write badly, not take what we do so seriously that we can't afford to make mistakes. It's just words in a document after-all, and we can change them, or scrap them as we see fit, at any given time.

I know, I know, I'm putting off working on that story I talked about in the previous post. ... "it's just words in a document; ... It's just words in a document...."