befriending my creative anxiety

plus a Blue Room update!

quote attributed to Henri Matisse

Recently I asked my doctor for a prescription of Clonazepam, a medication in the benzodiazepine family of drugs that has been really helpful to me in the past with acute, debilitating anxiety.

She was happy to fill the prescription (I love my doctor), but in doing her due diligence, she asked me for some context, and wondered if I would like to explore longer-term solutions. I explained that lately, I’ve been feeling immobilized by anxiety, which has not killed my desire to work on creative projects, but has made actually working almost impossible. Some of this anxiety can certainly be chalked up health insurance fuckery and financial stress as a result of my recently diagnosed illness.

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But mostly, I suspect that my anxiety these days is more existential, though I didn’t figure that out on my own. It took my friend Jesse to gently remind me that anxiety is just part of the creative life. They referred me back to a book I had originally recommended to them, The Courage to Create by Rollo May.

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I had only ever read the preface, but I’m now reading the whole thing, and it’s really helping. Not to rid me of my anxiety, but to help me accept it a bit more and resist it a bit less.

Rollo May is reminding me that the creative impulse and the creative encounter are intrinsically anxiety-producing. He rejects the reductive theory that artists are by our very nature disordered and the resulting implications “that talent is a disease and creativity is a neurosis.”

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Rather, May suggests that the very impulse to create is a rebellion against death:

Creativity is a yearning for immortality. We human beings know that we must die…. We know that each of us must develop the courage to confront death. Yet we also must rebel and struggle against it. Creativity comes from this struggle—out of the rebellion the creative act is born. Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one’s death.

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I think I have tended to resist this explanation of the creative impulse because a “yearning for immortality” seems both grandiose and crass, and I have confused it with “ambition,” with a desire to be “successful” on the world’s terms. I have spent a lifetime of trying (and mostly failing) to make my life’s work legible and valuable to my family and my age-peers; I have also worked hard (if not entirely successfully) not to measure my worth by their standards, and to reject “ambition” and “success” as they are commonly understood.

But I am coming to realize that the impulse to live beyond one’s death, to contribute something lasting to the world—this is not necessarily the same thing as our traditional notions of “ambition” and “success.” Indeed, often the artists and thinkers who have the most lasting impact on the world have lives that look, in their own time, like abject failures, full of rejection, self doubt, and often poverty.

Still, they continued to create (thank god!).

And even without the added anxiety of needing to be “ambitious” and “successful” on other people’s terms, this grappling with and rebellion against death at the heart of the creative impulse is intrinsically anxious.

Another source of anxiety for artists lies in what May calls the “creative encounter.” He argues that creativity is not something inside of us, but rather it is a process that involves an encounter between the artist and the world. Creativity, therefore, is forged in relationship. It is a sort of alchemical, emergent process that requires a state of receptivity that “must never be confused with passivity. Receptivity is the artist’s holding him- or herself alive and open to hear what being may speak. Such receptivity requires a nimbleness, a fine-honed sensitivity in order to let one’s self be the vehicle of whatever visions may emerge. It is the opposite of the authoritarian demands impelled by ‘will power’…. [A]n artist’s ‘waiting’ … is not to be confused with laziness or passivity. It requires a high degree of attention….”

The executive function paradigm, which is all about “will power” and control, perversely twists this attentive waiting into a sort of distraction, a lack of focus, because it appears “unproductive” and “inefficient” (productivity and efficiency being central obsessions of the executive function paradigm). I would argue that it is precisely this lie—that our intensity, our sensitivity, and our waiting are pathological—that creates so much of our so-called “dysfunction” because the lie is so pervasive and persuasive that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But even when our creative impulse is not distorted into pathology, and pathological anxiety, this receptivity at the heart of the creative encounter requires vulnerability that is almost by definition anxious.

Yet another source of creative anxiety, according to May, lies in the gap between our vision in the moment of creative encounter, and our capacity to express that vision through some artistic medium. Quoting James Lord, who wrote about his experiences posing as a model for the 20th century artist Alberto Giacometti, May notes that “Lord correctly assumes that the anxiety is related to the gap between the ideal vision that the artist is trying to paint and the objective results. Here he [Lord] discusses the contradiction that every artist experiences: ‘This fundamental contradiction, arising from the hopeless discrepancy between conception and realization, is at the root of all artistic creation, and it helps explain the anguish which seems to be an unavoidable component of that experience.’”

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This is similar to the insight offered by Ira Glass in his quite famous

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"gap quote":

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners…. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.

What Glass refers to as “taste,” May suggests is the very vision at the heart of the creative encounter; and what Glass refers to as “your ambitions,” May would call, I think, the death-defying creative impulse; and whereas Glass suggests this “gap” between our vision and our ability to realize the vision is merely a stage, or a phase; May understands that gap as a fundamental part of the creative encounter that is intrinsically anxious.

I’m sure Glass means to be encouraging by characterizing this “gap” as temporary and bridgeable. In my experience, though, May is closer to the mark, which I suppose could seem discouraging, but to me is actually quite calming and reassuring. If I know that this existential creative anxiety is part and parcel of a creative life, which also brings me so much meaning and joy; and if I know that I am in the company of so many artists throughout time, artists who have also brought me so much meaning and joy—well then, maybe I can manage it.

In any case, both Glass and May suggest that practice and commitment are key to narrowing (if not closing) this “gap.” Glass offers a sort of Protestant work ethic pep talk (which I personally find simplistic and off-putting): “Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions…. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

May, on the other hand, offers a more nuanced, even magical or sacred, description of the value of practice and commitment. Breakthroughs in our creative process, he suggests,

never come hit or miss, but in accordance with a pattern of which one essential element is our own commitment. The breakthrough does not come by just ‘taking it easy,’ by ‘letting the unconscious do it.’ The insight, rather, is born from unconscious levels exactly in the areas in which we are most intensively consciously committed…. One can quite accurately speak of this incomplete Gestalt, this unfinished pattern, this unformed form, as constituting the ‘call’ that was answered by the unconscious…. [I]nsights emerge not chiefly because they are ‘rationally true’ … but because they have a certain form, the form that is beautiful because it completes an incomplete Gestalt…. The new reality has a kind of immutable, eternal quality. The experience that ‘this is the way reality is and isn’t it strange we didn’t see it sooner’ may have a religious quality with artists. This is why many artists feel that something holy is going on when they paint, that there is something in the act of creating which is like a religious revelation.

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This description of creative insight and breakthrough resonates deeply with my own experience of “visions” that come to me “whole,” and I agree that these moments are almost always preceded by intensive periods of work and practice. The problem arises, it seems to me, when the anxiety intrinsic in this whole creative enterprise (and other anxiety, resulting from, say, health insurance fuckery) grow to such proportions that it overwhelms and immobilizes us.

When we can’t work, can’t practice, can’t even get started … there is no true encounter, no breakthrough, no magic.

So, what to do in those moments?

For me, in the short term, I’m not gonna lie: benzos help. And I’m grateful for a doctor who doesn’t shame me for occasionally needing some pharmacological relief when my anxiety threatens to swallow me whole. But I don’t think the “longer term solutions” my doctor was offering are going to be the long-term solution to my creative stasis.

It feels a bit counterintuitive, but for me the solution to immobilizing anxiety is actually to surrender to it. Resisting my anxiety and treating it like an enemy to be vanquished only seems to feed and strengthen it. Instead, accepting anxiety as an inevitable part of the creative life—being gentle with it, befriending it even—seems to have taken the edge off as effectively as any medication ever has.

For me, the key to this acceptance, this gentleness, is knowing I’m not alone. Befriending my anxiety is by definition a relational act, and it’s best done in creative community—not just with Jesse, and my peers in Divergent Design Studios,

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and many of you who read and respond to this newsletter, but with every artist I have ever loved, all of whom worked in that space of self-doubt and anxiety, but somehow found the courage to keep making art that has indeed lived beyond them, bringing me not only joy and beauty, but also feeding my own courage to create.

These days, my anxiety feels manageable, I’m working again, and it feels good.

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Blue Room Update!

Thanks to everyone who participated in my poll last week about finishing several long-neglected projects in the Blue Room. Here were the results:

Paint the damn closet doors! was just barely the winner, which was perfect as that’s what I was most inclined to do anyway. (Also, my son borrowed my picture hangers, and I still haven’t gotten them back…)

So, in addition to getting the first coat on the closet door, this week Jesse and I got our YouTube channel The Spiral Lab connected to (gulp) TikTok

(I know I know! But if you wanna talk to the kids, you gotta go where the kids are hanging, right?)

So, here’s your update!

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRsSbEBJ/

I’m writing, researching and filming new YouTube videos(!), running DDS (with lots of help), making Reels/Shorts/TikToks … and so the home renovations are going slowly, slowly. But if you want to follow along in real time, follow The Spiral Lab on Tiktok (and also Reels on IG @divergent_design_studios), and soon YouTube shorts as well!

1. Interestingly, the illness itself has not caused excessive anxiety, and has been, perversely, permission-giving: in the early days, when I was debilitated by fatigue as a result of my medications, I felt a lot of things, including fear and sadness, but interestingly not debilitating anxiety. For a few months, I mostly read mystery novels and napped, without any anxiety—apparently living under the cloud of a serious, potentially life-threatening illness and having something objective and external to explain my fatigue was what I finally needed to “justify” my lack of engagement with any sort of work, creative or otherwise. This strikes me as pretty sad. We shouldn’t need to be at death’s door to feel OK about resting and taking a break.

2. May, Rollo. The Courage to Create. W.W. Norton & Company, 1975.

3. Ibid., 39.

4. Ibid., 31.

5. Ibid., 83, emphasis mine.

6. Though I couldn’t quickly find an original source for this.

7. May, Ibid., 61-69.

8. The Peer Support topic in Divergent Design Studios this past week was creative collaboration, proposed by my dear friend and colleague and creative collaborator Adina, and the insights that came from those peer support sessions will definitely be a topic for another newsletter article soon.

9. Another significant part of the creative process, according to May, is rest and stillness. This is why I like his formulation better than Ira Glass’s. But that will be the topic of yet another newsletter!