Art vs. Hell: Reclaiming the Spark

“What you’re doing is wrong. It’s worthless. You’ll never get seen. You’ll never be on the level of so-and-so, so you can’t succeed…”

Every artist ever suffers from intrusive thoughts like these—internally contradictory, aggressive, pretty-much-telling-you-to-kill-yourself thoughts. Some have it worse than others, but everybody has them. What’s going on here?

Conspiracy theory of the day: creatives everywhere are under a universal spiritual assault designed to prevent them from creating anything.

Let me prompt you to ask yourself a scary question: how much of your mental and spiritual energy over, say, the past year, has been spent on being angry, frightened, or just plain exhausted by something that you have no control over—like, say, stuff you see in the news? Okay, now here’s a really scary question: are you addicted to it anyway?

Let’s think about this for a minute. I mean, really think. Let’s take America for example, with a population of about 350 million people. How many man-hours of creative thought and work do you think have disappeared into the void because everyone has been staring at a screen, scrolling endlessly, and waiting for someone else to solve their problems, to make the screen tell them something happy instead of something scary? How much creative potential have we lost because, like the citizens in Orwell’s story, we’re all addicted to our five minutes of hate? For that matter, what effect does it have on you as a person to be constantly involving yourself in a cycle of interaction where you’re spending potentially hours every day looking for the next tidbit to groan at or be outraged over, and then either doing nothing real in response when it comes along, or, at best, writing wrathful letters to politicians or posting mean things on the internet?

See, I’m not really picking on you, I’m picking on me. Okay, I’m picking on you a little; but really, I have been one of the worst offenders when it comes to this kind of behavior and I’m kind of just hoping, on the off-chance you’re guilty too, I can give you something to think about. Who knows, maybe it will help somebody.

After years of doing this, on and off, I finally hit kind of a wall where I realized I just couldn’t take all the negativity anymore. It’s not that all those awful things aren’t happening out there or that they aren’t worth being upset over; it’s just that the endless stream of awful will slowly kill you and destroy your soul. And on top of that, the mere act of engaging with it every day—scrolling, searching, trying to get that fix—was sapping my willpower to do… anything, at all. When you live inside a Skinner box, your brain learns to just keep hitting that lever and forget about everything else. Why bother taking care of yourself? It won’t fix anything. Why eat? You might miss something. Why do art?

See where this is going?

I think I finally realized that I wasn’t looking at the news because I cared, I looked at the news because I was addicted. That’s a tough realization to come to, because it’s very easy to confound those two things when you’re addicted. I mean, it sure feels like you care—like, a lot—except, in reality you’re just sitting there all day on your phone. Sure, there’s value in keeping abreast, being aware of your environment; but when it starts to sap your life force, it’s time to put it down and walk away. And after I did that, I learned something else: I am lazy.

There’s a reason sloth is regarded as a sin. It’s easy to blow off when you leave a pile of laundry sitting for weeks and weeks, never folding the clothes, because hey, nobody will see. Who cares? I hate folding clothes. But this funny loop happens where you start creating all this chaos around yourself by procrastinating, and slowly but surely it creates depression. That pile of clothes becomes a subconscious signal that you’re a mess. So does the stack of dishes in the sink, the overflowing trash can, the plants drying up for want of water, the dirty litter box, the stained carpet… and at some point, you basically give up. A pile of clothes you can deal with; but everything? It’s too much, it’s too much to even attack on your own. You find yourself drowning in your own sloth and incompetence and feeling defeated by it. But it’s not just the messy stuff, the obvious signs of laziness; it’s also the absence of creative work. You look back on the last few years and realize you haven’t made anything. You’re not fulfilling your purpose. You’re wasting away, but you can’t seem to get out of your pit. Ever been there?

Those physical things—the dirt, the mess, the stuff you needed to get rid of a long time ago to declutter—if you suffer from that, maybe you can tackle it yourself by doing a little motivational self-help and following some YouTube guides on house cleaning; or maybe you need a friend or family member to come help you out for a few days. There’s ways of dealing with it and dealing with it works wonders. If this is you—you need to deal with this. It really will help. But for some of those deeper issues, I personally found I had to recoil—from everyone. My thoughts and feelings had to get locked up and kept a state secret. And the reason why, as you might guess, was other people.

People, I’ve discovered, are often pretty cynical, and usually think they’re right and would like you to think that too. It’s a flaw I have in spades. However, I had pretty recently discovered a new source of joy, which had started really driving my creativity in healthy and uplifting ways; yet when I tried to share that joy with others, the reactions I got were sometimes pretty depressing. And this isn’t the first time I’ve observed this. Basically, as a rule, if you find something bright and joyful and try to share it with others, their cynicism will come out and bat it away. It’s not intentional, nor do they mean hurt—I don’t think these people have a clue how close I hold this stuff to my heart. But that’s what they do. And when those little attacks come, I find that rather than getting mad—like maybe a normal person would—I start doubting myself. I internalize the other person’s opinion and struggle over it. I internalize their attitude and start feeling towards my own interest the way that person feels on the topic, even if I also think consciously that they are wrong. After having my nascent and still-fragile inner framework of happiness rocked this way too many times, I finally decided to keep any progress in my artistic career basically a secret from the people around me. When I did that, I found that I was able to start making progress and getting grounded again; and that’s when I started noticing the problem that is the subject of this post: creatives everywhere are being constantly assaulted by self-destructive thoughts, and these thoughts seem calculated to tear you down as a person and prevent creative expression. We’re under attack.

I don’t think this is just self-criticism or just a threat response, though those are factors. I think it is also demonic, much like the voices a schizophrenic hears, constantly telling them nasty things. Sometimes you gotta break out Fr. Ripperger’s little black book and take the fight to the enemy. Other times you need to just take a nice bath. The point is, I think the little voices in your artist brain telling you you’re stupid and this and that are part of the same fabric of psychological and spiritual degradation as the negative-yet-addictive influences that come through social media and news sites. It’s all the same foetid junk, it’s all part of this universal clamoring voice whispering, yakking, and screaming in our ears all at once whatever it thinks will get us to do what it wants—whatever will destroy us.

Listen, if you have a creative bent, even if you’re not professional, you know to your bones that that’s how you’re meant to be. Your family might despise it, your friends might not get it, but it’s the truth. The One Who actually put you here clearly thought so! So when some influence comes into your life, whether it’s a person or a website or whatever, and it starts to deny, degrade, disrupt, or destroy (to put it in military terms) that part of your life, or that part of your person—it’s bad and you should get away from it. Spit it out.

That’s all I got for now. The rest, I’m still figuring out; I’m not some hidden master of the way of the creative, I’m just trying to survive. But I figure surviving isn’t a bad first step, and you can build from there. Thanks for your time, hope you got something out of this.

— Snek