Creativity, health and repression

Part of my therapy homework this week has been to find a way to express my thoughts about repressed creativity and health.

As I have been rattling on for years but am only just coming to appreciate in a tangible, useful way, mind and body are a single system. It makes perfect sense that my creativity, which I have just begun to learn is incontrovertibly and fundamentally a way of manifesting and changing my mental health, can also affect my physical health. It is hardly front page news to think that years of attempting to squash myself to fit into a life that isn’t mine has had fairly drastic consequences for my mind and my body.

I realise that for such a long time I have thought about my creative life in much the same way as I have been thinking about my physical body. I have persistently downgraded its importance to me. I have failed to nourish it. I have neglected to delight in it. There have been times when I have thought about it as shameful. I have also thought about it not as a manifestation of my health but as an expression of my madness.

I suffer from migraines. Those debilitating little fuckers have dominated my life for decades. Buckets of vomit that made my stomach bleed and my guts feel like I’d been kicked for days. Searing head pain that sometimes took me to hospital, contorted with agony. Sweats and shaking, temporary blindness and the inability to speak that would make people think I’d had a stroke. Visual tears and distortions, rips in reality that made it impossible to walk without falling over. Fainting in public places. Collapsing in motorway services to puke into carpark drains because the toilets were too far away to get to safely. Grinding, grinding pain that has etched its way into days of my life and the bones of my body.

Post menopause, things are better. I still get them, but they come as whole body events nowadays. They start with the feeling that I’m coming down with the flu, then weird food cravings and finally the knotted gnarl of the head pain that arrives, these days with spiking neck and shoulder pain. These are a thousand times better than what went before. I can still function, albeit slowly and more carefully.

Hormones played a big part in the old migraines, but even before puberty, I had them and even after menopause, still they come. These though, I am sure, are down to my emotional and mental health. I tend to get them after therapy or when I’ve gone through a stressful experience I haven’t had time to fully process in the moment. They also seem to be a way of releasing things I have been holding onto for too long. They are my body’s way of clearing things out. They manifest when I have lifted up an area of my mind where I buried a lot of old trauma and turned it over for new planting. I am learning to welcome them as a sign that some shift has happened. I’d prefer it if my body would just write me a polite note, but I’ll take what works.

Since I started making art for myself, there are signs that might be omens that tell me about the rightness of what I’m doing. Sometimes it’s that voice I was talking about in my last post. I’ve lived with many voices over the years. Most of them awful and a lot of them not even my own. This voice is different. This voice knows what’s good and right. This voice is me at my best and I am learning to listen to it when it speaks. It started as a whisper, but the more I make, the stronger it gets and the stronger I get.

The other thing that tells me if what I am making is ‘good’ in a ‘this is vital for your wellbeing’ way, is when I get a migraine. It seems counter intuitive that something so painful could be a herald of something so positive, but there we are. What I do hope though, is that as I learn to work more and more creatively and express myself, there will be less and less deep, twisted horror to release. It’s a good thing to keep working towards.

As well as releasing stuff that I need to get rid of, the migraines make me slow down. It’s no good trying to power through a migraine. That just makes everything worse. Back in the day, they would literally stop me in my tracks. These days its more of a note to self, that no matter how ‘good’ this thing I’m doing might be, it would be better for me in the long run to allow that goodness to move a little more slowly and integrate more smoothly. It’s in those slow, calm moments that I can think more clearly about what my body is telling me and what my body and mind need next.

Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I’d have learned to listen to myself earlier. If I had not just pushed through and masked the discomfort either with my behaviours or with painkillers. If I had taken up a meaningful relationship with my creative life sooner. I know what’s done is done, and I wouldn’t have had so many of the wonderful things I have in my life now, if I hadn’t lived life the way I have, but it is still an interesting exercise, if only to remind me to do things differently going forward.

The thing about repressing that creative urge for so long is that it didn’t go anywhere, it just built up and built up until the pressure was intolerable. At those points I would get migraines or have nervous breakdowns or get angry in ways that felt irrational at the time, but now, with hindsight make perfect sense. Then, when I did do creative work, it was so often an expression of sorrow or rage, or madness. It never resolved because I realise now that I spent most of my life working on the symptoms, not the cause. Now I am using my creative expression to work my way towards resolving the cause.

Most of the awful stuff I’ve been holding onto sits in my neck and shoulders. I have the deep urge, when faced with things I don’t want to look at or think about or participate in, to hunch into myself. It’s totally understandable, but bad for my posture and not great for releasing pain. I am learning that pain, both physical and mental (which for me are often the same thing), releases itself much better when I open my heart to it.

Sometimes there isn’t enough room in my neck and shoulders for all the crap I’ve held onto over the years. I am a great one for storing things bone deep. My teeth and jaw carry a lot of sorrow and a lot of unexpressed anger. There are pockets of resistance everywhere to be honest. The word resistance is deliberate. I used to think the pain was there to punish me for my inability to conform. Now I think it was my body holding out for the possibility of change and a critical, creative reconnection to self. I am slowly learning to excavate those pockets. I am listening to what I find and honouring that by learning to make things I love out of what I find.

It’s good to make things out of all of that stuff. It’s important to me to turn something that felt so toxic into something fertile and nurturing, but all the same, I think that one of the most damaging ideas I grabbed onto as a teenager was the idea that to live a truly creative life, suffering was mandatory. At the time I was suffering and I didn’t know how to stop being in pain, so it was easier to find a narrative where I could take that pain and turn it into something more creative and meaningful, but it is a belief that has done me a lot of damage over the years. I no longer believe that the only good creative life comes from madness, pain and sorrow. Art can be a valuable way to express those things, but it is equally good when it comes to expressing the more ineffable, joyful things too.

I am also working to change the beliefs I had around a creative life that stopped me from seriously considering it in the first place. I had been thinking that if I couldn’t make money out of art, then I was not in a position to spend so much of my time making it. If other people didn’t like what I made, then there wasn’t any point in making it anyway. If I couldn’t give it away or sell it, then I thought that it had no worth at all. I had been thinking of my creative life as a childish, rather infantilising part of me. I thought that if I could just grow the fuck up and straighten my head out, I could put all this kid stuff behind me and start life again as a proper adult. I couldn’t admit to myself that the thought of doing that made me feel sick to my stomach. I thought I might be able to fix that with enough therapy.

I had been thinking; ‘What kind of sad woman spends her time making terrible art?’ ‘How does a woman like that justify her life to other people?’ Even when I was making things anyway, these thoughts would tumble through my head. I knew, in my gut, that I needed to make things but I always felt I needed a reason that wasn’t just about me. I started to fantasise about going to art school, just to buy myself three years to make things without feeling I had to justify myself to myself and others. I believed that if I learned to be the ‘right’ kind of artist, then I would be ‘allowed’ to keep making it if I couldn’t fix myself sufficiently to take joy in double entry book keeping or jam making.

At bottom, this all boiled down to the big question, which I found very hard to say out loud, but which was so fundamental to all this bullshit: ‘What is the point of me?’

Actually thinking that bald, violent statement and worse, saying it, was brutal. I was so afraid to ask it, it made me ill. When I looked back at the long list of things I had failed to do in life, and the longer list of things I had done under sufferance, with resentment or just plain badly, I really didn’t seem to amount to much at all. It’s why I threw everything I had into being a mother, to my own kids and anyone else that was passing. It was the only thing I felt even remotely capable of in a way that felt grown up and permitted. But by the time I hit the therapeutic couch last Autumn, I also felt utterly trapped and hollowed out by a surfeit of mothering. There I was, faced with the ‘what is the point of me?’ question all over again.

The answer to that question is that the point of me is to find a way to be the best me I can be, for me and nobody else. That me doesn’t need to have a price tag, or a certificate, a value or a diploma or the acceptance or appreciation of anyone else. That me can take her time to figure out how to walk into a future which is unknown and exciting rather than one which is patterned on what other people do and frankly, fucking terrifying.

I don’t need to go to art school, or take a class in anything unless I want to. I don’t need to make art that is worthy or pretty or anything. I don’t need to stick to one discipline or become a master of anything. I just need to keep allowing myself to flourish and thrive. My mind, my body and my art are no longer places of repression. They are fertile ground in which I can grow and take up the space I want. I am learning to stop hunching into myself like a dirty secret. Now I can learn what pain has to tell me before I let it go and make room for happiness. Pain once sank into my marrow. Joy makes me feel like I have bird bones.