Archive for the ‘Loneliness and Creativity’ Category
The long silence
Greetings people, or at least those of you still remaining after my long silence. I have found it absolutely impossible to write lately. I had done a lot of thinking (and some writing) earlier on the subject of loneliness and creativity, but I’ve never experienced anything like this. I stare at a page and the words don’t come. I think about blogging and my mind goes blank. I try to do research for Book The Second and my brain just fizzles.
Never before have I had such trouble getting thoughts done on paper (or on the screen). I think this has a lot to do with post-separation isolation. Writer’s block was one of the things that scared me when Danielle announced that she was leaving me. On top of everything else I was facing — the separation agreement, the chaos around the house, the goodbyes to all the pets — at the back of my mind I thought, “I’m not going to be able to write.”
That was three months ago, and I’ve barely written a word since. I can journal, which is a relief and a blessing, but I can’t think about publishing anything. Publishing feels so exposed, so risky, so…public.
If I had any doubts about the relationship between loneliness and creativity, they are over. It is hard (impossible?) to be creative when intensely lonely. I can read, and I can journal, but I just can’t write. I know what the problem is: I need a sense of emotional security in order to feel creative, and I just don’t have that right now. I feel vulnerable and insecure, and those feelings choke out anything that might be interesting, fruitful or new.
I am, however, going to make a renewed pledge to blog. A blog is a nice mid-point between a diary and a published piece of writing. I figure if I can blog at least once a week, that is a sign of some progress, and I think I have to be measuring progress in very small steps right now.
So please stay tuned…more blog posts to follow as I try to work my way through through isolation and towards (hopefully) the ability to write once more.
Thinking about the health effects of loneliness
Some readers of this blog have written in to ask how they can respond to some of the health problems loneliness seems to trigger. I’ve been mulling this, and trying to think of a response that’s both reasonable and workable.
I don’t want people to think that loneliness is utterly dire, that it will immediately land you in hospital, and leave you instantly sick. This isn’t true. I talk about having my health and sleep go all wonky when I was extremely lonely, but–when I think back on those years–I realize I wasn’t taking very good care of myself.
I think that part of the response (when thinking about the health effects of loneliness) is to recognize that loneliness is capable of cuing changes. This is Step One. Step Two involves treating yourself kindly: eating as well as possible, getting as much sleep as possible, treating yourself to massages (touch!), and exercising every day (if this is possible for you).
In other words, I think loneliness has to make you more health conscious. If you’re lonely, you need to take care of yourself. “Self-care” is a phrase that bugs me–I want others to care for me!–but I think it’s an important part of responding to loneliness.
Another response involves writing. Keep a journal. Write down what’s happening to you. If you’re not into diary keeping, write songs, or sketch something, or listen to your favorite music. I think that loneliness can be profoundly non-creative: it shuts down communication. Communicating in your own way, privately, through a journal, or a piano, or a painting, can go some way towards off-setting the feelings of aloneness that can lead to health risks.
Send me your thoughts on this. I don’t want lonely people to think, “Well, there are health risks, so I might as well throw in the towel.” This isn’t true! Taking charge of your health, and finding some way of externalizing feelings of loneliness can, I think, be a route to better health.
I’m going to be blogging about this more in the future, as I continue to think.
Are we all fundamentally alone?
A new comment on Lonely has just appeared in Canada’s Globe and Mail. In it, Leah McLaren sums up by saying that we’re all fundamentally alone–that we’re born alone, die alone, and spend time alone during those two pivotal moments.
Leah and I went back and forth on this during my interview, and I respect her right to conclude that loneliness is just part of the human condition, because we’re all so essentially alone. But I really, really disagree with her.
I just don’t think that we are, or are meant to be, fundamentally alone. Social science research is showing the extent to which we need each other–if we’re subjectively or objectively isolated for long periods of time, we die earlier, and–before that death–we have more things go wrong with our bodies. There’s been a wonderful, ongoing experiment conducted on our ability to know when someone is thinking about us (described in the book The Sense of Being Stared At): the experiment shows that some part of our brain can detect human connection, even if the rest of our senses cannot.
I decided when writing Lonely that I would not address the whole notion of “fundamental aloneness,” largely because the idea seemed uninteresting and out of date to me. But many people clearly still think this way. Perhaps it was spending years reading about loneliness and social connection that made me realize how connected we really are — and I probably shouldn’t assume that others are simply going to appreciate these ideas.
I could go on and on here (in fact, I am going on and on), but I think the notion of fundamental aloneness just doesn’t accord with what I strongly suspect to be true: which is that we do most of our growing in relation to others, and that we’re intensely and uncomfortably vulnerable when we do find ourselves–through no choice of our own–on our own too much of the time.
Did loneliness spur my creativity?
It’s slightly awkward to be in the position of having written a long memoir about loneliness, because it feeds into the idea that loneliness is a creative force—that it’s something that spurs you to greater artistic heights and new endeavours.
I don’t think that’s true.
The best writing I did with LONELY came from times when I felt connected. I’ve just come out of another period of profound loneliness—the shrivelling, cold-making, insecure kind. And I didn’t write a word. I didn’t want to write. I had no spirit; no inspiration. It’s only now that the worst feelings of loneliness are behind me (for now!) that I feel able to put my fingers on the keyboard again.
I think that I was able to write LONELY in spite of my loneliness, not because of it. The last thing I want is for LONELY to be seen as proof that loneliness feeds creativity. LONELY is a strange accomplishment, something I had to write with my eyes half-way shut to just get through. If I’d really given into loneliness, I seriously doubt that the book would have been finished at all.
Is loneliness tied to creativity?
Many of the lonely people I interviewed in LONELY said that their feelings of isolation made them more creative: they wrote songs, they wrote poems, they painted. It’s a very common idea that lonelinss somehow feeds creative work.
But that’s not the whole story. I think that what loneliness does, above all, is fuel a huge need to communicate. And if there’s no one around to talk to, or laugh with, you’re going to turn to a journal, or write a short story, or pen a song about how alone you feel.
But that doesn’t mean that loneliness is a creative blessing. Experiments have shown that people who are cued to feel isolated actually do worse on thinking and reasoning tests than people who feel connected. This suggests that loneliness—rather than being a creative blessing—can actually interfere with the sharp skills you need to create something really good.
Am I saying that loneliness has nothing to do with creativity?
No. What I am saying is that I think we have to stop seeing loneliness as something that makes us better than we would otherwise be. For a long time, people saw depression as key to creativity. It was as though, to be a successful writer or painter, you had to have a mood disorder.
And loneliness has been lumped into this category—it’s often cast as something enriching. As I noted in an earlier post on loneliness and creativity, loneliness does create the urge to communicate, and that’s probably key to a lot of creative work. But I think lonely people who do good work are doing it despite their loneliness, not because of it.
We’ve stopped seeing depression as a creative gift. We need to stop seeing loneliness in this light as well. Yes, loneliness can spur you to say something, and that’s really important. But it’s not the key to creativity. If anything, in leaving someone exhausted and worn out and sad feeling, it probably—in the long run—interferes with it.
I know this is not a popular position to take on the issue of loneliness and creativity, but as a lonely person who works in a creative field, it’s the position I stand by!
Doesn’t loneliness make you existential? And doesn’t existentialism make you smart?
Another idea that tends get linked to the notion of loneliness and creativity is the notion of loneliness and existentialism. The idea goes like this: Loneliness makes us aware of the fact that we are ultimately alone. Awareness of this essential aloneness is, in theory, freeing and enlightening, since it allows us to march to the beat of our own drummer, create work that is true to our inner self, and turn our backs on social expectations.
I have a lot of problems with the loneliness = existentialism equation. First off, I don’t think that we are fundamentally alone. We’re all works in progress, and we derive our moods, ideas, and indiosyncracies from relating to the people around us. It’s not uncommon to know when someone is thinking of you; it’s not uncommon to hear the phone ring and to know who it is that’s calling (even if you don’t have call display); and it’s not uncommon for emails to cross, with each message writer being prompted to write by thoughts of the other.
I think that, at our best, we’re linked. We’re supposed to be linked: for safety, happiness, protection, and growth. We develop in relation to the people around us: if you take those people away, we become not stronger and more insightful, but weaker and more limited.
Loneliness in small, bite-sized doses might indeed pull you away from the crowd for a while and give you a chance to recognize your own concerns and priorities. Excellent. But let’s not characterize long-term loneliness as something that makes us profound. We need other people in our lives, and telling ourselves that loneliness is a “gift” is a hoax like any other.