On anxiety and creativity: when navigating ambiguity, storytelling can be dangerous
exploring the stories we tell ourselves when no one is watching or, maybe worse, when it seems everyone is
“You’re never going to kill storytelling because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.”
—Margaret Atwood
In the last few weeks, life has felt particularly heavy due to many unknowns.
I found myself navigating the process of buying a new house during a faltering economy and job uncertainty; meanwhile, my husband was diagnosed with a genetic disease, hemochromatosis, which makes the body store too much iron. This diagnosis came at a time when he can still reverse damage, but we had to go from appointment to appointment to determine this.
The stress of unknowing settled in my neck and blurred my thoughts.
In the days of unknowing, while we also waited for an inspection on the new house and test results to come in, my head pulsed with pain and, I’ll admit, my imagination went wild. Migraines always hit me during times of stress, and these past few weeks have been particularly rough.
I kept reaching for the one thing I’d been doing less of since returning from Vermont: writing to find out what I actually thought. Writing to process. Writing to journal and dream. Writing to connect to a different part of myself—the part that doesn’t feel anxiety but, rather, flow.
When I was 19 and began writing compulsively, I had started for purely therapeutic reasons.
I found that writing was a way of building self-awareness but also exploring the stories that fed my anxieties. Seeing my own thoughts in black and white showed me how my mind worked and helped me to clarify my existence.
Writing alone in a room with a question or two propelling me forward and my imagination focused on creation, rather than explanation, led me to what Joseph Campbell called the path of bliss. It was a freedom and coming home to curiosity over speculation.
Anxiety, I firmly believe, is just creative energy working against us. It is pure speculation. And it’s addictive, especially when the world feels heavy.
A life of creative exploration, à la Hurston (see last blog post), is innately fulfilling but easy to lose track of when we get caught up in our own stories about the past and future. Or stories about how the world should act or react to what we do.
Things are clarifying in my own life.
My house purchase is going well, and my husband’s diagnosis means lifestyle changes for him, but it no longer carries the weight of the unknown. My headaches are easing, though they are still something of a mystery (possible causes: hormones, food, environment, the state of the world).
But I remember the reason I do what I do, which is to return to curiosity and release the grip of storytelling that feels more like torture than bliss.
To process on the page, honestly and as person navigating the world, is to find the opposite of anxiety. It’s to find that bliss Campbell spoke of. But to do any of that, we have to remember what we don’t know.
Getting clear about what we don’t know, after all, is where we truly create.
Well told. Thank you.