Hello world.

How’s the week going?

I’m sitting on my porch by the orange tree, having a bit of a revelation about the nature of creative work. What it means, how it functions, and everything I got wrong about it when I was younger.

TODAY’S INSPIRATION

In a trance, I underlined these quotes in Winterson’s memoir, Why be Happy When You Could be Normal? this morning:

“This is the most dangerous work you can do. It is like bomb disposal but you are the bomb…Everyday I went to work, without a plan, without a plot, to see what I had to say.”

“I was ready to jump off the roof of my own life. Didn’t that have a romance to it? Wasn’t that the creative spirit unbounded? No. Creativity is on the side of health—it isn’t the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness. The lost furious vicious child…wasn’t the creative…she was the war casualty. She was the sacrifice.”

-Jeanette Winterson Why be Happy When You Could be Normal?

They are about writing, about being a writer, but they are really about living.

GOING TO WORK WITHOUT A PLAN

I love the first one because as a writer, I’m constantly going to work without a plan. I’m constantly starting sentences with no clue where they will go, and each time I am so sure it will be no where. Each time I think, is this the end? Do I have nothing left to say? But then I find something, somewhere along the way.

So Winterson may have been speaking to the experience of writing, but she was also speaking to the experience of life.

One of my professors says that that is how he feels every time he walks in to lecture us. He never quite knows what he is going to say or if it will work, he just begins. He “works out a thesis” in front of us. Some other professors have it all etched out. They bring their notes, their slides, their perfectly formulated ideas, and they share them with us. But there’s a difference. One feels formulaic and lifeless, whereas the other feels spontaneous and alive. It’s a very cool thing to watch someone work, to peer into their mind, accepting the chaos and messiness as it comes. It’s inspiring.

I’m a planner. I organize and map out and think through most of the things in my life. Every academic essay starts with an outline, I like to know the end before I begin. I want to know how it will finish. But personal writing is more of a labyrinth. I enter one way and get completely turned upside down and all around about halfway through. I end up in places that I didn’t know were living inside of me. In that way, it really does feel like detonating a bomb. The bomb of your own mind. Memory is a minefield and writing is walking right through it. My brother once told me that the only reason I can function without therapy is because I write. I’ve never needed someone to push me into the shadows of my own mind, I do it willingly. If anything, I need someone to pull me out. To grab me by the hand and yank me up to the surface of the ocean so I can gasp for air every now and then.

But to bring it back to the point, I am learning to live life a bit more like a personal essay, and a bit less like an academic one. I’m learning to embody chaos instead of perfection, mainly because one is real and the other is not. One opens your life up to love and the other keeps you behind glass, separated from humanity as a spectacle that no one can relate to.

WHAT I GOT WRONG ABOUT CREATIVE WORK

(TW: mentioning of suicides)

As for the second quote, I suppose it spoke to me because it is another thing that I am still just learning. Back in the good old days of my miserable late adolescence, I wrote incessantly. The worse I felt, the more I wrote. And, quite frankly, the better it was. I couldn’t see much clearly back then, but I could see that. It’s probably why I romanticized those years so much, why they did not feel as miserable as they truly were while I was still inside of them. Depression is a dark room and you can only see it clearly from the outside in. When you’re on the inside, you think that it is all that there is. You think it is the safest, most wonderful place for you. You don’t want to leave. It’s only once you are better, once you are feeling the sun in your eyes again, that you begin to fear that room. You aren’t afraid while you are in it, that’s the scary part. At least it was for me.

All to say, for a long time I equated darkness with creativity. I thought that the former fed the latter like water to a chia pet. The darkest times I ever lived through were the times that produced the best writing, so how could I not? When I was happiest, writing was much harder. But I see now, and thank god, that I got that all wrong. Good writing was never the reward of depression, it was the life raft. The worse I felt, the better it was, because it needed to be. It needed to save me. And it did.

But before I realized that, I thought that sadness was the art. I thought that the carcass of my seventeen year old self was the most beautiful thing I would ever see because to me, she was art. It didn’t occur to me until much later that she was actually a sacrifice, a casualty of war. One that writing didn’t thrive off of, but in spite of. That blew my mind.

I used to look at all of the great artists who killed themselves, Sylvia Plath, Elliott Smith, Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, and think that they were so good because of the kinds of minds that they had. I mistook their creative genius for their mental illness. I thought that if you were that good of a writer or an artist, that a young death was inevitable. That it was the price of being great. How strange to come to understand that it’s not so romantic. That maybe, perhaps, these creative giants did not die because they were great, but despite it. The tragedy is that they died, yes, but it is really that at some point, their art stopped being enough to save them. Their minds failed them long before their death. It was when their work stopped being able to save them, that life became unbearable.

I see now that that is maybe all art is ever trying to do. Save us.

Love, m.

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