Since my anxiety struggle began and I got my OCD diagnosis, I have found it more difficult to write than before I struggled with anxiety. With a mental health condition, it's so easy to get lost in the suffering and mental turmoil that comes with life with a mental health condition. Everything else becomes blurry background scenery and static when I'm just trying to survive from one day to the next. I can barely even hold it together enough to go to the grocery store, so of course I can't sit down and write a novel or short story or even a poem.
I am at my most creative when I am well. Sure, I write about life with a mental health condition, and that includes the mental turmoil, but I can only write about that after I have survived and come out on the other side of it. While I'm in the middle of it, nothing but survival matters. Art doesn't matter while I am in the middle of suffering through an OCD spiral. It's only later, after I have taken care of myself and gotten back to a healthier place that I can think clearly and logically enough to put anything down on the page.
I started to notice this suffering artist trope in movies, TV, and even online in articles and cute Pinterest pins. These things romanticized suffering, and they made it seem like the artist had to suffer to create something great. Some artists even refused help because they could only create so beautifully while they were suffering so terribly. I also started seeing things about the link between mental illness and creativity. Those articles pointed out that creative types are more likely to be mentally ill. The romanticizing of mental illness continues...
Here's the problem I have with the suffering artist trope: People romanticize the suffering with mental health conditions as the CAUSE for the creativity, like almost everyone that creates something beautiful must be suffering, which is an incorrect assumption. That makes it seem like if a person gets help, all their creativity will be gone, which, of course, is going to make some people afraid to seek help for a mental health condition, especially if they believe their art is all they have.
I think some people come into the world innately creative, and then some of those people develop a mental health condition while other creatives do not because mental health is unpredictable. Then the people that were already creative use that creativity as a way to cope and process life with their mental health condition. They use creativity as an outlet, but that doesn't mean their mental health condition caused them to be creative. I think the creativity is a way of healing and recovering. I also think that if a creative person got help for their mental health condition, their creative powers would flourish instead of vanish because the turmoil and suffering wouldn't weigh the mind down.
Your mental health condition didn't make you a creative genius. You were already a creative genius, your mental health condition was just the piece of life that made you feel deeply enough to realize you needed to say something about it, much the same way love, anger, and heartbreak make people realize they NEED to say something to the world.
If we're going to romanticize anything about mental illness, we should romanticize recovery. Romanticize the strength it took to fight your way out of a spiral and get the help you needed, and think of yourself as the hero of your own epic story. Romanticize the kindness you show yourself in getting well instead of the suffering you're clinging to for the sake of art.
I'll end with this: The suffering artist idea is a myth. Creativity isn't a side effect of mental illness, and mental illness isn't a side effect of creativity. An untreated mental health condition and the suffering it brought didn't turn anyone into a creative genius. Suffering with an untreated mental health condition isn't something we should romanticize. You don't have to cling to the stereotype of the suffering artist to create something beautiful because beauty also comes from being kind to yourself and allowing yourself to recover.
No comments:
Post a Comment