Creativity and Difficulty
There is this feeling I have been subconsciously nurturing throughout this past year. It’s one that I have had a hard time letting go of. I have created a self-imposed idea that I might emerge from the pandemic with something whole and finished. A piece of art, a book, a story that might encapsulate the strangeness of a year in quarantine. That expectation is amorphous and dangerous. We cannot begin to understand how we have changed and will change from this experience. Why should we expect the same of our art?
It is incredibly hard to reflect on a trauma as it is occurring. And it is impossible to heal from something before the wound has closed. We are still in this.
A few years ago, having gone through a period of grief, a friend asked me what writing I had created during that spell.
Writing? It was a good day if I took a shower and made dinner.
But, the friend persisted, some of the best writing, the best art is made from our sadness, loss or grief as humans.
She was right, of course. Art born of pain shows us we are not alone in our deep feelings. Was there something wrong with me that I couldn’t make something beautiful from my pain?
No, nothing wrong. I was just trying to survive. Any writing I did was elemental – a way to connect myself back to who I was before I was in pain or who I would be after. Nothing from that period could be salvaged for a final draft. I didn’t have a brilliant breakthrough and write a novel in two months about heartbreak and grief.
The pressure to create in quarantine, in this year, has been large but it is during times of great stress that I have always found it difficult to be productive. Everyone is different but my trauma response has traditionally been to go numb or dissociate. I am much better at not doing this (thank you therapy) than I was when I was younger, but still. It is incredibly hard to create when we are running on fumes.
And yet, at the same time, art and writing connect me back to myself. It is a practice, like daily meditation or reading tarot cards, rather than a set of goals or a calendar cluttered with deadlines. Art during the pandemic has been a well I have drawn from. The process of art-making is messy and constantly unfinished. For me, and many others, that feeling has grown in this limbo between pandemic and post-pandemic. The world next year, a world that might be closer to normal, will never be the world we’ve known. And the way art and the pandemic have merged and collided will continue to evolve as we reflect on this time in the years to come. We can only guess at how we will feel.
Creativity comes not simply from the work of sitting down in front of a blank computer screen. It comes from the world itself and how the world forces us to reckon with all those big internal emotions that guide our lives: joy, love, anger, loss, guilt, shame, regret, want. All those internal machinations are tied up living. In this year of separation, we have felt the feelings, but we lacked the ability to engage with the world. We have been removed from the traditional way of exploring ourselves and our creativity. We have lost physical connection to our communities.
When I worry about being judged for my lack of a finished book after a year of quarantine, I think about how art is meant to be created. Stories do not occur in vacuums and art is meant to reflect the textures of our world.
I crave those textures. At the end of a long workday, sitting in my tiny apartment, I find myself dreaming of past travels and gatherings and all the creativity that is born of interaction. A train ride into Boston. The California coast at dusk. The cozy chaos of my mother’s kitchen. Twilight at my aunt and uncle’s house, a bottle of wine being uncorked in the kitchen. Laughter. Music. The memories are imbued with a deep, wild hunger. To greet my life again will be the greatest adventure and the deepest way to know my creative self.