How Creative People can Harness their Superpowers and Transform the World

“Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.” — Pablo Picasso

Counselling a suicidal woman in her fifties wasn’t an easy thing for me. Although I feel relatively competent in crisis management—whilst equally respecting that I’ll always have more to learn—I always felt on edge when working with her. Boy, did she teach me a lot. All my clients have, over the years. But for the purposes of this blog, I’d like to talk about the lessons she taught me about creativity.

She had a brilliant mind. She was exceptionally intelligent and creative. Her creativity emerged the more I’d ask her about philosophical ideas: Her inherent ability to associate abstract ideas with others taught me a lot about creativity. I came to believe that creativity is analogous to cognitive flexibility: an ability to think beyond immediate contexts. She showed me just how much of a superpower creativity can be if it is harnessed correctly.

The Initial Presentation

My client came to therapy because she was depressed (and had been chronically), void of hope, and suicidal, unable to heal from the grief of falling out of touch with a man she’d fallen in love whilst holidaying in Spain. Throughout my studies, I’d heard many times before that the risk of suicide is highest when someone who has been depressed for a long time spontaneously moves through a period of elation. If the individual were to relapse, once again, into a depression after having experienced what life were like out of that horrid abyss, then hope would be lost forever, and suicide might soon follow. To have lived in a cave for so long to then, only for a moment, feel the warmth of the sun on your back before darkness returned sounds like a hellish nightmare. My client conveyed these ideas to me many times.

During an early appointment, I asked her what she thought life outside the cave was like. “What’s your idea of happiness like?” I wondered what it might be like for someone to think about a concept seldom, if ever, experienced. (She once told me that it hadn’t been since her wedding day with her first husband that she’d felt happy.) She looked me straight in the eyes and said that happiness is “The feeling that what you have is enough.” I paused for a moment. She’d nailed it! Happiness is the cessation of want. Happiness is enough-ness. She made me think a lot about the link between happiness and creativity. Here was a middle-aged woman with a powerful imagination; yet she was deeply, deeply depressed. How could it be that someone with such cognitive flexibility couldn’t conceive of an idea that would reduce her suffering? It would take me many months of reading, personal therapy, and continued appointments with her to realise that, for creative people, the key to their happiness lies not in the reduction of psychological rigidity, but in picking a path and, more importantly, developing the discipline to walk down it.  

In this blog, I’d like to write about why I think creative people struggle to live within the confines of an ordered, routine-based society, as well as what you can do about it if you are creative (because not everyone is!).

The Nature of the Game

For people to get along, categories, rules and systems must be put in place. “Order” gives us an identity, as who we are is what we do across time. We, at the individual level, need to be able to stand on solid ground to understand who we are and who we want to become. Practically, a sense of routine helps us pay the bills, get to work on time, remain healthy, co-exist in a society, and, more importantly, achieve our goals. But order isn’t enough. Order can become dull, mundane, and even tyrannical (from a political perspective). Something needs to be there to balance order out, to update and re-calibrate it. Chaos is the name given to this polar opposite (and I’d highly recommend Dr. Jordan Peterson’s corpus of work on the interplay between chaos and order.) Chaos is the place where creativity lives. Society boxes and restricts creativity into art museums and works of great literature because to experience the unbounded divine would be to drown in it and merge with it entirely—we can save that for death.

Societies simultaneously revere and punish creative people. Societies value certainty and safety. Art values danger and nuance. The creative looks at the society from the outside and is confused by it; better yet, the creative is confused by society’s members who don’t appear to be confused by what they are doing! For these reasons, creative people—truly creative people—don’t “get” societies. They live outside societies, in the land of ideas, where new concepts and visions are far too terrifying yet wonderful for the conforming individual to comprehend. They couldn’t comprehend it because the very thought of it would tear down the walls they think protect them from what they don’t know: the “others”, the “crazy people”, the foreign and the lost. The death and destruction of their view of reality would mean the end of them—and that’s true! If only they could see that it might simultaneously be the birth of someone better.

Unfortunately, the creative—far too open-minded for this world, retreats. The creative must find some way to contain their rich, inner landscape. This is extremely difficult without the necessary restrictions that order provides. Every day, the creative wakes up with a full head of ideas ready to be made manifest and express themselves in the world. As author Elizabeth Gilbert states in Big Magic, “The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.” The creative, not yet the artist, doesn’t realise that the task of her soul is artistic expression, offering others her perspective, her vantage point. The creative—the dormant artist—has too much power and too little control.

The Dormant Artist

My client had a wild imagination, but she was a slave to it. Her imagination was her master, not her servant. Her thoughts and feelings of grief, abandonment, rage, love, loss, death and dying blew me away. That said, she was nihilistic and cynical. If only she could have filtered that pain—and the ideas that emerged from it—into an offering for the rest of us. I tried to encourage her to create, to become the artist I knew she could and wanted to be, but I did so cautiously so as not to tell her how to live his life.

In my years as a counsellor, I have learnt that a client’s pain isn’t mine. Whilst that might sound crude, a necessary detachment helps me to not bring work home and, more to the point, ensures I don’t project the ways in which I might go about resolving my problems onto others. Although pain, for me, is best transmuted through artistic expression, I respect that that isn’t the case for everyone. My point, however, is that there must be a way for all of us to transmute pain, and my own biases hoped to God that my client’s key to growth was also through artistic expression.

The Consequences of Inaction

The creative is destined to live a lonely life. They live far too far away, far beyond the confines of society. Try as they might to merge and connect with other creatives, peace ensues when, and only when, they recognise that their creativity, like all others, is unique. By embodying this creativity and expressing it, they live uniquely, and inherent within that uniqueness is existential isolation.

I have long thought that creativity offers us what could be, as compared with what is. Again, creativity helps us think beyond the immediate context of our circumstances. Whilst this is wildly beneficial for strategic problem-solving and survival, there comes a time when we must accept what is (as opposed to what could be); and this, I believe, is where the creative struggles. It is very hard for a creative person to be in the here-and-now. How can they be when they were born in the land of ideas. To live, however, and to let their creativity turn into art, they must be both here and there.

My client often shamed herself because she couldn’t manage the demands of living. Her creativity was too overwhelming. She lived in a world that was entirely her own. And because she found it so hard to exist in the world of routine, her inner land became unimaginably dangerous. That’s when the “disorders” began to emerge. Although able to rationalise and understand it, my client was unable to put creativity into action and let her ideas turn into art. I explained to her that creative ideas are like water: they won’t go away; they’ll just trickle and flow somewhere else. Sometimes they’ll flow into good places, other times they won’t. Turning creativity into art will help control for that risk and, more importantly, developing the discipline to work on a creative project and see it come to light will only boost mental health.

Discipline Turns Creativity Into Art

This seemed to resonate with her, and it wasn’t the first time I noticed sparks of motivation dart off her face like sprinkles of powdered sugar on a vanilla slice. I then asked her to describe her ideal self to me as though she were conversing with this version of herself—a common Gestalt technique knowns as the “Empty Chair”. I closed my eyes and told her that I would do my best to picture that version of herself too—and, also, to give her feedback about the vividity of the images that came to my mind. As you might expect, her creativity, having been provided with an avenue for expression, spilled into the room and transformed the energy. I heard her speak in rhyme as she described and conversed with her sixty-year-old self, embracing a handsome, deeply present man as her partner. She described the strokes of her paintbrush on canvases she admired greatly. I visualised a proud woman, someone cognizant of her own value. Her creativity, for just a moment, became art. And then the door was closed just as quickly as it opened, shut forcefully by the hopelessness of nihilism.

In that moment, I learnt that something—some force, or belief—is required to turn creativity and art; they are not the same thing. My client could not see how her creativity could be made manifest, given how dark her reality was. Would she need hope? Maybe. Faith? Probably not, given how cynical she was of both religion and spirituality. It become clear to me that creativity without conscientiousness is a recipe for disaster. Creativity gives both to wonder and awe, but it fails to provide the grounds for consistency in action. Conscientiousness, on the other hand, gives rise to stability, structure, and achievement, but it lacks nuance, excitement, and reverence.

The Perfect Mixture

Anything worth doing takes time. The creative sees ten different projections of what life might be like at the top of mount Everest; and although they desire so desperately to reach the summit, they fail to place emphasis on practicality, routine, and the discipline necessary to reach the top. This is where the creative can learn from the “mundane” individuals of society.

I do believe that the perennial task of the creative is to turn that dormant, divine energy into art, something tangible, expressive and of use to others. Art, you see, rejuvenates societies. It reminds us that we are here for an unfathomably small amount of time. It tells us that, whilst the “Johnson report” may take priority in our nine-to-five, what is more important—spiritually, for the soul—is to bathe in the beauty of existence and living an intrinsically meaningful life. Smell the roses, for they only offer themselves to you!

“Hey, bureaucrat! Yes, you in the suit. You. Are. Alive! Wow! Look at your hands. You control those things. Look at the sky, and the trees, and people smiling. This is all going away soon. Remember not to forget!”

Creative people remind us of the beauty of being and of its finitude. As Nietzsche said, “We have art lest we perish from the truth.” Creative people don’t want anything to do with society because it lacks the awe inherent within the nature of reality. That awe moves through them constantly like electricity. To tell them to go to work and get a job is like snatching away their life force. It’s like trying to teach Pythagoras to a cockroach. But if only creative people would entertain the minimum effective dose of “order”; they’d give us beauty like Van Gogh did! Then, and only then,—perhaps!—their suffering might cease.

That is the power of the creative, and my client could not bring herself to do this. It wasn’t her time. The strength of her grieving was too strong. She wasn’t a failure; I was for trying to force an idea onto her. Still, I believe to this day that there might be an artist in there, somewhere.

An Ode To Creatives

Society might not make sense to you. I am here to tell you that it probably won’t ever make sense. But if you can turn cynicism and resentment into discipline and ambition, I promise you your ideas will change the way the rest of us see things. Please recognise that there is utility in order. You can use it to show us a side of ourselves we don’t know exists. You live in the land of ideas, and we need those ideas to remind us of our inherent sovereignty. We could use your art. We need to forget our lives, momentarily, whilst we hear your songs, read your words, watch you dance and hear you speak. You are our life force. Hone your craft. Develop it into its magnificence. Don’t see us as wrong—merely unenlightened. Creatives, your task awaits.