More on anxiety

Anxiety & Creativity
I re-read books all the time. I always get something new out of doing so. If it's fiction, I've probably forgotten the plot. If it's non-fiction, I will have lived more of my life, and grown and changed, and therefore, I will bring a new perspective to it. So, I decided to re-visit Eric Maisel's Fearless Creating. When I first read this book, ten years ago, I was either in gradutate school or just post graduate school. (Yes, folks, I am back, once again, in graduate school. A. I love to learn. B. I don't think the grad program I went through ten years ago was the right one for me. If at first you don't succeed, try, try, again.) I know it was ten years ago when I first read it because on one of the exercises he suggests doing, I wrote in the book--and dated my entry. (Yes, folks, I write in books. It's sort of a dialogue between me and the author. Or just me and myself. I paid for the book. I don't feel guilty.) He writes about anxiety in the very first chapter, and I'd like to share some of that with you here.

...while anxiety is the greatest immpediment to aliveness, in order to create you must invite anxieties into your life and live anxiously. ... Each stage of the creative process is characterized by its own kind of anxiety.... In its negative aspect it blocks the artist, causes her to limit her scope or create second-rate work, and more. In its so-to-speak positive aspect it is like the itching that accompanies the healing of a wound: horribly uncomfortable, but proof that creativity is happening.

creative blockage: the inability to manage the anxiety that attends the creative process

A large part of this book (perhaps all, I'm not sure since I haven't re-read the entire thing yet), is about how to manage creative anxiety, and I recommend reading it and doing the exercises. (Caveat: I don't endorse every single last thing that EM says in any of his books, but on the whole, I believe that he has good advice and an interesting take on things.)

The Creative Itch
Here is something that I don't think Eric Maisel adequately addressed in this book, nor did Julia Cameron in The Artist's Way. (Maybe they do in other books, I haven't read everything that they ever wrote.) I am assuming, if you are reading this blog, that you have a creative itch. Are you scratching that itch in the appropriate way?

Here's what happened to me. I went off to Hollywoodland for college, with the idea that I was going to become a great actress--or at least a working actress. But I kept running into (creating within myself?) all these blocks. I had extreme anxiety about not only auditioning, but also about learning lines, everything connected to being an actress, really. But I still wanted to be an actress. Why? Was it just an ego thing? Was I really that full of myself? I don't think so. And then later, when I decided to go back to graduate school, I once again went into a theater program, with the idea that I'd be a director. So, why didn't I get out and try to work in theater more? I have all these friends who stayed really involved after school, working around Atlanta in local theaters. Instead, I took a job at a film equipment rental company and worked with a lot of filmmakers, helping them get their projects accomplished. (Julia Cameron calls this sort of thing I was doing "being a shadow-artist.")

Was I just delusional? Why did I say that I really wanted to do these things, borrowing zillions of dollars to go back to school, and then not do the follow through, anxious or not? Here's what I've decided. I WASN'T SCRATCHING THE ITCH IN THE APPROPRIATE WAY. (Eric Maisel is big on managing anxiety appropriately.) I WAS IN THE WRONG FIELD COMPLETELY. I'm not saying that this realization came easily. Far from it. It took me a long time and lots of courage to state that I wanted to be a writer. But once I said that out loud, I realized that saying I am a writer came so much more easily to me than saying I am an actress ever had.

Well, of course, parental disapproval had something to do with it. My dad thought that being a writer would mean that I was condemning myself to a life of poverty. But he didn't like the thought of me being an actress either. If I knew that my dad disapproved of both writing and acting as career choices, why did I decide that acting was the creative outlet for me? I think it's because writing is so important to me. And the thought of failure as a writer was so much more overwhelming than the thought of failure as an actress. So, I took a very very long detour from the creative path that I really always should have been on. I was scratching the creative itch in the wrong spot, the wrong way.

If you feel a creative itch, but you aren't really able to focus and/or accomplish even baby steps in your creative endeavors, do you need to try a completely different creative field?