If there is anything that I’ve learned about the healing process is that it requires creating something from what remains and going beyond. Healing is a creative act and creating is a part of healing.
It might be for that reason that the stories of creators of various stripes, particularly artists, touch on the process of recovery and transformation that they go through in producing their work, in part as a reaction to trauma of some sort.
I’ve seen, experienced and deeply believe that our traumas and confusions are often fixed by creation. Sing in the choir. Paint pictures. Write poetry or a blog. This is a space for healing, it allows me to write freely and discuss things that I might not elsewhere to the same extent. For me, writing is a healing act.
When I get into one of those spaces for rumination on something not particularly enjoyable, perhaps painful such as a memory and all it elicits or a present conflict that I’m dealing with, I find it rather circular. I think, I worry or fret, and re-think and repeat. Creating is the pathway outside of that.
Putting things out there
Writing is also a way of putting some of those thoughts and feeling down on paper. However, as I’ve learned, there is a difference between writing as a journal and creating something. Journaling is something I’ve done since I was a teen, something not that common for a man. Journaling helps honour what has happened, what I am feeling and allow me to give form to what is going on inside me. However, it’s not the same type of creating as something like writing for an audience, even if I am creating the audience through the writing.
Writing and art allows me to find new ways of engaging the world. It makes my world a little bigger. When I’m in my darker moments, that bigger space allows me to see light and let it in. When I am in moments of great light, it allows me to shine it more on those spaces that are dark. It’s always a win-win.
It’s partly because creating is also about putting something into the world. My journal never gets into the world, much. A website post, an Instagram picture, a tweet, a video, or a painting shared with a friend or even just intended for a friend can all get us to summon courage and marshall us to create coherence in our story. It’s not about having us style the story for the world (it’s our story after all), but it means making coherent sense of what it is we want to say for others, whatever the medium.
Creations usually have some rules of form, which create the boundaries that focus the creative process. These boundaries like the border of a canvas, the margin of a page, the three-line form of a haiku and so on all are vehicles for coherence. That’s probably why creating is so healing: it allows for us to bring coherence to things that we are experiencing as incoherent. We add structure to the mess.
This all reminds me of just how important that dialogue between the creator and the audience becomes, which is why healing is always partly social.
When writing about the rules of creation for the new, non-print media (which was, at the time of his writing, not even digital), Edmund Snow Carpenter stated the following ‘rules’ about how the creator deals with their audiences:
“1. Know your audience and address yourself directly to it
2. Know what you want to say and say it clearly and fully
3. Reach the maximum audience by using existing channels
Whatever sense this may have made in world of print, it makes no sense today. In fact, the reverse of each rule applies.
If you address yourself to an audience, you accept at the outset the basic premises that unite the audience. You put on the audience, repeating cliches familiar to it. But artists don’t address themselves to audiences; they create audiences. The artist talks to himself out loud. If what he has to say is significant, others hear and are affected.” (Carpenter, 1970, p. i (forward))
Talking to ourselves in public
There is a lot of evidence to suggest that talking to ourselves is highly therapeutic and healthy. What creating does is present you with an audience — even if that audience is you. But mostly, that audience is others.
I once had a moment of intense heartache and disappointment as a wonderful relationship that had started ended suddenly without warning or much sense. Suddenly, all this energy I had that was devoted to someone else, our relationship, the worlds that we shared and were building, was left unfocused. One of the tools I used was social media.
I have a very uneasy relationship with social media. There is an increasing body of evidence that time spent on Facebook is detrimental to your mental health — and the same may be true for social media overall. This obviously plays out differently among people, but I know that I almost always — probably 9 times out of 10 visits — feel worse about the world and life after a visit to Facebook, which is why I barely use it. However, social media can be a source of creative energy, too.
I used to use Instagram as a means of focusing my gaze on the world around me. My posts got me to thinking about what I was seeing and capturing that in some creative manner. I really enjoyed it, but stopped posting much as I got busy and found that social media was distracting me from the world.
When my relationship ended, I renewed my focus on Instagram again, focusing a lot on the creative potential within the various media — photography. Since then, it’s got me out and thinking about what kind of things I want to capture, how and in what means do I wish to present these ideas. But it was also a way of speaking to myself out loud. It’s about healthy self-presentation in this case. I don’t have many followers and don’t really care how many people see my pictures, but it gets me creating.
Don’t wait for inspiration to hit — just write, paint, sing, photograph, record — whatever. Create.