Anxiety, Your Creative Loved Ones, and You.

Life

Life is a strange teacher. Untiring, relentless, and often merciless, it continues to heap tests upon tests on you. For the creative ones, these tests come with a continuous mulling over of every possible scenario that could result from every possible decision. This incessant churning of thoughts gives them heartburns, turns them into hysterical zombies, and gives them sleepless nights.

The Zombies

These creative professionals must use their energy to create or they’d soon find themselves out of work.

When anxiety takes over and hogs their energy, creativity slinks into a corner.

Unabated anxiety makes them neurotic and they struggle to keep their focus. Their creativity gets bundled up and thrown in a corner because of family concerns – because their aging parents whom they love but who’ve turned absurdly paranoid and who insist on taking decisions that may devastate them or leave them destitute, and when stopped from doing so for their own good, sulk for hours and complain to everyone how nobody cares for them; or because someone who’s really close to their heart, suddenly decides upon a completely new way of living, wrenching them out of their little comfort corner that’s so necessary for creative expression; or…oh, there could be several different reasons that vary from one to another.

& You

And when the creative ones try to climb out of this hole, their repeated attempts weaken the hole, and the dig themselves deeper and deeper into it. At this point, they need a loving, caring glance – someone who would smile down upon them and offer a hand. They need someone with a practical head upon their shoulders, to explain why they cannot hold themselves responsible for everyone else’s unhappiness – at such a time, ignoring them, laughing at time, or asking them to be sensible, doesn’t work. Trust me on this. A few might be able to climb out on their own, but most won’t – and then you’ll have a real reason to laugh at them – those who could’ve been an Agatha Christie, a JK Rowling, a Frida Kahlo … could fade away from the world, because you didn’t open your arms to embrace them.

The decision to love them still or not is entirely yours.

Read about Creative Anxiety Disorder here.
Also read Why Creative Geniuses are Often Neurotic?
And Why writers have a higher risk of depression?

Ending with a quote from Paulo Coelho:

“All stress, anxiety, depression is caused when we are living to please others.”

Read Paulo Coelho’s thoughts on anxiety here.

Writers, artists, and performing artists spend their lives pleasing others, creating worlds, characters, images, environments to enchant others – they cannot stop being what they are, anymore than you can stop being who you are – stand by them. They need you.

Also visit Lydia’s blog here and read her short story “From Dumpsters to Dining Rooms” here.