Creativity is our medicine bag: Part One
The pain contains a message
You know that experience of stuck-ness, right: that haunting pain that surfaces from time to time?
For me, it shows up as fear, or as a voice that taunts: you’re doing it all wrong. Believing its message tips me into paralysis that, despite everything I need and want to do, means I don’t, in the end, do anything—or at least anything that feels creative, expansive or beautiful. I had one such episode recently. ‘It’—the stuck-ness—felt murky, formless and fearful. It hurt.
At first, I put it down to external factors: the political, environmental and economic unease pervading our world right now; end-of-year malaise; an interruption in my routines during a period away from home. In fact, what I was hearing was the strong, siren voice of resistance, a message emanating from the inside.
It took me a while to realise the voice was pointing me towards something else: the need to step up and be braver, to be bolder in my expression, to re-commit to purpose.
It’s uncomfortable to admit publicly to these moments of apparent ‘weakness’ or ‘inadequacy.’ It re-activates my fear, the worry about what people think: she’s doing it all wrong. Yet, if we don’t share our uncomfortable experiences, what are we here for? We’re wasting opportunities to connect with others, to witness and be witnessed, to give and receive empathy.
Worse than that: it makes us complicit in the belief that creativity is just about the good stuff—the energy it gives us, its beauty, its light. It feels important to acknowledge that there is no linear path to creative freedom; and, moreover, that the feelings of inadequacy and discomfort are intrinsic to it. It feels even more important—I could go so far as to say we have a responsibility—to support each other through that discomfort.
Floundering in my stuck place, I tried to figure it all out alone, to analyse the reason for the fear. It took reminders from several of those I love and trust to realise that we don’t need to know why. We just need to notice the pain of the stuck-ness—perhaps even befriend it—and listen to what it has to say.
I re-read ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, an essay by science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, which explores amongst other things the concept that stories are containers for our human experience and connection. I’ll share more thoughts on Le Guin’s essay in my next post but, for now, what I’m struck by is how stories, of course, have their shadow side. What the title of Le Guin’s essay brings to mind is ‘baggage’: the metaphorical rather than the actual kind. The baggage of the past that weighs us down; old stories that cement, or are cemented in, pain and conflict, whether individual or collective /cultural. Stories that, if we let them, sediment our ways of being.
We can change the story if we’re willing to switch the container we put it in.
We can let the pain of stuck-ness overwhelm us, or we can accept it as a gift, a receptacle for the fullness of our experience. The creative container we choose (in Le Guin’s case the fictional form of the novel) is ‘a medicine bundle holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.’
This premise holds up, I think, with whatever creation we’re making—especially, perhaps, the creative project of making a life. Remembering that we are creative beings, and that we have choices about the containers we put them in, is in itself a ‘medicine bundle’ we can access as we need. Â
Much as we’d like to, we can’t just pop a pill to take the pain away when creativity overwhelms us. Pain, after all, is the body’s way of transmitting important messages to keep us safe and ensure our survival. We navigate the pain to experience the fullness of living; to access the insight, on the other side, of what it has cleared, what it has created space for; the potential that has opened up through the healing.
What I know is that, having got to the other side of stuck-ness (at least for now), everything looks different. The novel I’m writing is changing shape and form, deepening in texture. I have more clarity about the work I want to do, with whom, and why. That’s the best medicine of all: for myself, and—in sharing the experience—I hope also for others.
It’s not just medicine, in fact, but a prophylaxis of sorts—not to prevent future pain but a means of enduring it with more grace; as a resource to be better equipped when the pain (inevitably) resurfaces.