Fearing Creativity

 I've been having a lot of thoughts recently, and the most recent one is that I have believed I could not survive 'losing myself' in emotional experience, mainly in experiences whereby I am creating. I am going to test this belief by creating. A lot.

One of the central things I have learnt over my last 2 years is that even if I cannot tell what I am going to say, there are countless potential utterances/expressions that are pressing themselves against my mind in attempt to come out, to see the light of day. I should trust this process - I think most great artists do. I imagine they do not ponder day in and day out, speculating what they should draw or write about. They do it. They draw and write, and in the process itself, it is revealed to them what their subject matter is. In the process itself. It's like any good therapy - the two people likely do not know what is happening as it is happening. An authentic 'moment of meeting' where this situation has never happened before and thus an abundance of change can occur, significant steps towards newness can happen. This is the creative process, this is the thing of which I have been so afraid, and this is the thing for which I want the most.

Recently, for two nights, I smoked weed, and it felt like quite a bit. But while being high, very profound thoughts were coming to me, and very somatic experiences too. "There are infinite truths/realities" is one that sticks with me. I mean, every moment is fundamentally a unique moment, a new phenomenology that has never happened before and will never happen again. We inhabit a ridiculous amount of moments throughout our lives, but I (and I don't know about you) have rarely appreciated this nuance and specialness in a given fragment of my existence. One moment I may have an idea, or rather I may have a certain value system which I say to you I shall die for, then one moment I inhabit another mental mode, another system of values, where I tell you in those previous values I was mistaken, but this structure, these virtues I hold, oh, these are the stuff of the gods. How zealous and overconfident we are in what we think we know, and what we hold to be true.

I was talking with my girlfriend the other night about how I will never 'have' the truth - what I content myself with is having a stable position whereby I can subsist through my days yet have some porosity into letting new information in. For many a year, I have been more impermeable than I feel is good for me. I wish to let more in, and to be affected by more experiences. The difficulty with this is that when you let in a new experience, it is uncertain how it will incorporate itself into your mental structure. There is no certainty that you will 'survive' the experience - by 'survive' I think I mean coming back to stable-enough position. You know why people avoid experiencing certain emotions, going to ridiculous lengths to circumvent the pain of memories or facts? It's because they do not believe they can (and may in fact not be able to) survive the emotional experience. And what is the risk in this? What is the alternative to stable structure? Schizophrenia, I believe. Where a fragmented emotional and sensorial experience rules the day, fleeting and feeling from moment to moment, little to no through-line, dominated by whims and fancies. That's the alternative to the stable position. This, I think, is what people sense/feel (the feeling is present but the reason for the feeling may not be identified, people just say they feel scared or something like that) when they have the prospect of confronting a strong emotional experience. There is always potential that is shatters open their stable position, unable in its current state to incorporate such an overwhelming experience, and therefore the other stable 'facts' in someone's live become untethered/unwound, which leads to the fragmentary subjectivities of the schizophrenic. Subjectivities, I feel, is an apt term - the schizophrenic inhabits different systems of value, but so frequently and with so much incoherence between the other systems of value that it is as if they are multiple personalities. I feel in schizophrenics, however, there is still a relatively stable structure within them, in whatever category (i.e. sports, movies, the weather) and good psychotherapy seeks to align them with this personality, to construct further structure from the foundation of this stable-enough system. The treatment of schizophrenia is a little different from my main point however, that point being: people fear becoming schizophrenic as a result of overwhelming emotional experience, which may blow away and demolish any pre-existing mental system of values and beliefs. Therefore, any experience, sufficiently new, is feared (and actually, if we're being honest, every experience is new, nothing repeats itself 1-to-1, so there is always the potential of stability becoming irrecoverable for an indeterminable about of time) and this is, I believe, why I have feared the creative process. I don't know why or how I have become sensitive to the fear of 'losing myself'; all I know is that this has dictated my earlier life for much of it.

Again, it is only by doing something does one realize what occurs, what is in fact the case. And for me, with the creative process, there is no amount of thinking about it that will uncover what it means and how it is for me to simmer and steep in it. I have been doing it this whole time, during this chunk of writing. I here remind myself that it feels good, it feel enlivening and exhilarating. There is always the risk I lose myself, and that's the risk I'm willing to take.