Happiness or Creativity
Can they co-exist?
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Creativity is complicated.
For me, one of the most reliable and consistent sources of creative inspiration is discontent. Or sadness. Or frustration. When things are hard, I am often motivated by that and use it to make what I make (plays, gangles, etc.). Sometimes, I am stunned into a depressive state and cannot even fathom doing The Work at all, but usually, something is born of those sullen states.
I started noticing that pattern when I was about nineteen and, at some point, wrote in one of my journals, “I’m only in the mood to write when I’m not happy.”
It’s a scary thought. As someone who is deeply identified with his work but also conscious enough to know that happiness is probably a better overall goal (wink face emoji), I get conflicted.
I want to be a happy person, but creating is what makes me the happiest, and my creative inspiration is often tied to unhappiness.
It’s important to me to say that those down-moods are not the only sources of inspiration. There are also times when joy, or romance, or anger are the well from which I draw. Those moments are random, fleeting, and harder to control, but they exist.
The most reliable source is, without a doubt, dissatisfaction.
The tricky thing about a creative center that is most reliant upon sadness is that when joy comes - when the peace and simple okayness of day-to-day life is larger than the usual existential dread and fear of living a life of dreams unfulfilled - the well can run a bit dry.
That’s where I was this week. I’ve was doing okay. I was fine. I was medium. I was almost - dare I say it? - happy. The sun came out, and there was a day where it was almost warm. I got myself to work out a few times. I watched a bunch of silly and inconsequential television with my husband on the couch (and that part was actually amazing).
It was one of those weeks where, perhaps because I was not writhing internally, I sat down to write, and the well was mostly dry.
In the simplest of ways, I was doing life.
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