The Creativity Crisis
My husband suspects I'm quickly losing my sanity. This morning I got up at 7AM to drive 90 miles to Massachusetts to pick up an antique bureau I procured on the notoriously unreliable Facebook marketplace. He whispered over our daughter’s sleeping head, “Is it the medicine?”
Yes—probably. Which medicine? Definitely.
He was—I think—referring to the migraine preventative I recently started, but he could’ve just as easily been asking about any one of the ingredients in my morning cocktail. Ironically, as I begin to feel better, gain energy, motivation, and purpose, while losing pain and anxiety, I get crazier, and what I suspect appears more impulsive to the outside observer.
Yesterday, after showing my mother the freshly painted bathroom, in which my new bureau will live, that I painted early mornings in the same week I started a new full time job, she asked, “Is this the adderall?”
But I’m not losing my sanity, nor am I developing some impulse control disorder. Instead, I’m peeking my head out of the door after a long, rough storm of disability. It’s been almost a year since I stopped breastfeeding my daughter, which lasted roughly 15-months. During that time, I had a reprieve from chronic daily migraine and depression, both of which returned with ferocity after my hormone levels returned to their postpartum normal. It’s been a battle to find the right medications and the right corresponding dosages, and in the meantime, I was greatly debilitated. I’ve been lucky to have good providers, and a loving support system, who all helped me get through it. I never know when storm season will resume, but it always does.
I was pregnant and in graduate school (which I finish this July) when we moved into this house. Taking care of an infant, now a toddler, and my own health are always the top priorities.
Though I have been busy at school, there was a lot of time lost to mitigating pain, oversleeping, and most notably, lost creativity. I’ve seen our downstairs bathroom with a black filter in my mind’s eye for over a year until it finally demanded my attention. Until now, it was a barren white room, sterile looking with white tile, white porcelain sink, white sconces with white lampshades, and a white, steel tub I haven’t bothered to cover with a shower curtain since no one uses it. The plan has always been to renovate “one day,” but until then, does it need to look coldly institutional and impersonal?
So I painted that mother-effer deep charcoal, nearly black and ordered an area rug, a new shower curtain and rod, replaced the lampshades on my goofy 1947 tile sconces, re-potted a beautiful pink stromanthe I scored for free on Facebook in a gold pot, hung some wall art, and brought home the bureau which will be repurposed into a vanity sink.
Completing projects make me feel good and they help me stay in a creative balance. Though a lot of writers can, I cannot sit down and pump out 1,000+ good words every day. It ebbs and flows, and some days are harder than others, particularly when writing about difficult or painful memories. It’s hard to work on the same piece day after day, too. It helps revision to have some distance from it, not unlike letting paint dry between coats. It allows me to take a break from my memoir-in-progress. Then, I can come back to my (freshly painted) desk and write about it to warm up for the hard work ahead.
No, I’m not losing my mind, dearest family, I’m getting it back.
What’s your creative process?