As someone in the ‘creative’ field, how many times have we been told, as a compliment, how creative we are, what a great idea that was, or how imaginative this or that is; and yes it’s great to be complimented. But lately, I have been really toying about the downside of being ‘creative’, which is also very real.
As someone who has a wild imagination that is constantly on the move, it can be, to say the least, tiring and overwhelming. A couple of years back [Instagram August 2021] I was here talking about ‘Creative Overwhelm’ and how creative people have an active [at times over-active] and complex mind and how they need to hone it and how each of us have our own hack to do so. Well, this post is not about that.
This is more about the negative or dark side of the creative mind. As Nietzsche has been known to say ‘One must have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star’, it’s rarely people who are comfortable with who they are or what their life is, the ones coming up with the best of ideas. Probably because when you are content with how things are there is not a real need to create?
Research has also found that creative individuals are often more narcissistic, though not in a totally bad way, but they are more focused on themselves, and spend more time inwards, on developing their own ideas and hence less time worrying about pleasing people around them.
Another necessary precusor to creativity is nonconformity, which is very interesting to me as an educator, where sadly ‘education’ in general tries to bring about an element of predictability and normalcy [for the lack of a better term at this point] in the learner [more about that maybe at another time].
All of the above makes us sometimes feel as if our brains are on fire; when we can’t sleep because a nagging idea is nudging us to get up and give it a shot, when we can’t focus on the day-to-day because its not feeding our free creative soul. When that brilliant idea is all we care about but life has other plans.
This is a fire we dont necessarily want to douse, as it is this fire that makes us who we are, but we also dont want it to engulf us and that’s where the bane of our existence; the balancing act, comes in.
