Getting Over Creative Disappointment

Bringing the vision over the "threshold" is hard. But we still have to try.

I’ve been in a bit of a work frenzy for the past six months or so—full pedal to the metal. I have a lot of energy and this happens sometimes, where I go and go and go. And then I crash. I crashed last week. Partly, I’m overdue for a break (I’m going on vacation next week). And partly, this happened because I started to feel really scared. I know many of us—maybe all of us, whether we’re conscious of it are not—are feeling very afraid. This is a strategic aim of this administration: When you’re scared, you’re below the line, and unless you’re a “fighter,” you’re likely feeling paralyzed. As a reminder, our fear responses typically are Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn, and Faint. (If you missed it, this is helpful: “Somatic Moves for Releasing Fear”)

Hilma af Klint, Fragaria vesca (Woodland Strawberry), Oxalis acetosella (European Wood Sorrel), Antennaria dioica (Catsfoot), Taraxacum officinale (Common Dandelion). Sheet 9 (Detail) from the portfolio Nature Studies. June 2–3, 1919 and May 24–25, 1920, Exhibition Poster, MoMA, $24.95

Our current atmosphere made Carla’s Q&A with me last week really timely. If you missed “The Law of Resonance,” it’s so good, in part because Carla reminded us that our vibration attracts similar energy. And we have a responsibility to ourselves to tend to it, as being in persistent fear (low vibration) is not good for our health. (To that end, as I crashed out last week, I woke up needing antibiotics and migraine medicine.)

Being in persistent fear is not good for creativity either. My friend (and coach) Courtney Smith told me that when you’re scared, you cannot play. And the two—creativity and play—are indelibly connected. As Carl Jung said, “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct.” And being able to play and therefore create feels vitally important in moments like this. In True & False Magic, psychiatrist Phil Stutz writes: “The war that we’re engaged in is evil versus creativity, and the antidote to evil is to create.”

So in this moment, where it feels like evil is afoot, it’s incumbent on all of us to stay out of fear and to create—and create in whatever format fits your gifts. It’s not about what you create either, or being “a creative person,” it’s about the process. Everyone—lawyers, entrepreneurs, politicians, activists, writers, artists, musicians, bakers, designers, cooks—is creative.

Phil’s work is particularly apt here because it’s all about addressing fear: Getting in touch with your Life Force, getting out of the Safety Zone, and finding your faith. The goal is to help people get in motion by contending with the three unavoidable domains of life: The need for constant work, that uncertainty is the baseline reality of existence, and that you cannot avoid pain. Through moving forward, through creating, you get in touch with the universe—no destination required. In fact, knowing the destination undermines the entire enterprise.

Here, Stutz’s work dovetails with Marie-Louis von Franz, one of Carl Jung’s longtime collaborators. In Creation Myths, she writes, “But fear…is the basis of creativity. Anybody who cannot stand the impact of the unknown naturally is not capable of creating anything new, or of letting something new come up, something creative. If he cannot stand this preliminary stage of panic or fear, he will never become creative, and that is one of the blockages of creativeness. Some people can never face this terrible moment of being overcome by the unknown, and for that reason cannot get into active imagination, talking to the unconscious.” (p. 193-194)

Creating things is hard—and terrifying, and disappointing. So many of us are “would-be geniuses,” to quote her, because the end result of our effort looks nothing like the original impulse. I’ve been trying to crack a chapter of my next book for a month—though really two years, as I’ve been chewing on it like a piece of cud for a long time. In my mind, I know what it needs to be—or really I can feel what it’s supposed to be—and yet I’m having difficulty getting it over the “threshold” of my unconscious and onto the page in a way that lives up to the ideal. It’s just not coming out right.

This is part of the process and it sucks. Marie-Louis von Franz writes, “Anyone who has tried to paint will have experiences what I call creative disappointment. Within oneself, one has a perfect image of something, and therefore one picks up the paintbrush or pencil with great enthusiasm. What one then ends up with on paper is a very sad, imperfect, and awkward copy, most disappointing when one compares it with the inner image that one set out to portray. … A real descent from above to below is always accompanied by disappointment. One can readily understand this, for, in the world of archetypes, one is inflated, as one is dealing with the gods. But this inflation is necessary because one cannot be creative without a certain enthusiasm.” (p. 68) (The etymology of enthusiasm comes from “being possessed by a God.”)

In this sense, it makes even more sense that creativity’s opposite is, in some sense, evil. As Stutz explains, “Creativity is the antidote to evil; Part X wants to keep you in evil; therefore Part X will try to convince you to destroy everything you create.” Or Part X will convince you to not even attempt to create, to stay stuck in this “would-be genius” land. Stutz is most famous for his work with creatives—screenwriters in particular—who struggle with writer’s block, or are unwilling to put pen to paper and take the fantasy of what “could be” into reality. After all, if you never finish making something it can’t be judged. You don’t have to contend with making a poor copy of something that feels like it has infinite potential in your head. But if you stay stuck, you atrophy. Part X wins. The only antidote is to keep moving forward, to keep creating, in whatever way you can.

Marie-Louis von Franz describes this type of procrastination (which we might also call apathy, or laziness) like this: “Creativity through play is such a well-known and essential factor that one does not need to point it out, but we see again and again that if we try to induce our analysands to do active imagination, all the skeptical rationalism pops out—that it is a waste of time, that one cannot do it, that one does not know how to draw, that one has no time today, or tomorrow, that one is not inspired—and whatever other blocking resistances of consciousness there may be. But every new beginning of consciousness, every essential process of consciousness, must first arise from such a state; only then is the human being open-minded enough to let the new element in and let things happen. Many creative people start their creativity with terrific depression. They have such a well-constructed and strong ego consciousness that the unconscious must use very strong means—send them a hellish depression—before they can loosen up enough to let things happen.”

She describes how many creative geniuses live lives in relative chaos, close to the unconscious; that others need something cataclysmic to happen in their lives for the doors to the unconscious to open. (It could be an illness, a heartbreak, the depression she mentions above, etc.) She gives Goethe and Beethoven as examples—and the fact that Jung wrote what he considered to be his most important work—Answer to Job—when he was in bed with a high temperature, a temperature that faded as he completed the book.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that falling apart is an important component to the process—feeling subsumed, and overcome, is essential. Your ego must be penetrated for something new to enter. This is scary and its chaotic but without this, nothing new emerges. The etymology of the word chaos comes from Greek, khaos: vast chasm, void. It’s composed of the prima materia, the material with which we create. To be inspired with something new, you have to go into the womb of chaos.

Here’s Marie-Louis von Franz again:

A pregnancy is, so to speak, an inflation. People sometimes resist becoming creative because one’s would-be creativity is always so much more impressive and important than the little egg one lays in the end when birth takes place. When you are full of would-be ideas, then you feel you will go far beyond whatever Jung said; you will bring out an idea that will revolutionize our whole age, and so on. That is what one feels—quite legitimately, by the way—when one is pregnant, because the whole unconscious is contaminated with this preconscious creative idea. You carry the whole Godhead in your womb, so to speak. But then when you sit down and do the hard work of setting forth your idea, there is a terrific disillusionment, and what you finally produce is generally a sad remnant of what you felt it to be when it was still inside your own psychological womb. Inside it feels tremendous, but when you bring it out there is always a relative reduction. (p. 129)

This “relative reduction” is part of life, too—nothing meets our ideals. Perfection is a myth. To be perfect would mean we were done, somehow—there would be nothing left to create. Everything we do is iterative and that’s ultimately the point. We are never done. We will always keep shifting and evolving. And that’s the ask: Keep creating, keep doing. It’s scary out there friends—but what if we also hold it as a training ground for staying in motion and continuing to create, even in the face of the fear. Actually, because of our fear.

Stay safe out there.