On Mental Health & Creatives
excerpts from a conversation I had with one of my ex-coworkers:
>Exactly I think none of us really have all the answers, I guess that's the reason we battle
>It's weird being a creative man cause in a quasi-ironic way you feel the best when your life is hectic and even though you might externally wish for "normality" you know you'd internally find it boring and again return to that hectic state chasing that creative high
>I guess that's the stuff that kinda makes a creative in the end and you just gotta embrace it, take it and maybe someday learn to savor it
>High functioning slightly broken individuals
>When you don't let nobody tell you who to be and write and your own narrative
>Totally ‘Cos like deep down we're normal good person but then it's coded in a lot of garbage bad bad thoughts and then on top of it there's another calloused layer formed from trying to meet some form of expectations of parents people and society...
>Sometimes it just like the problem is that you don't know what you're after. So you put everything that you have into what you do hoping that one day maybe you don't have to feel like you're empty
>Oh man I think were all fucked up lil oreos of mental problems but then afian you wouldn't wanna be any other type a cookie in a way too...
>I was reading this article the other day at it mentioned that in the creative professions, 20% say they suffer from severe depression and 24% severe anxiety. Now this is severe. The quote from the study is much higher than national averages.
One in five of us is suffering from severe depression from time to time and one in four of us suffering from severe anxiety. When we look at mild to severe on the anxiety scale, 52% of people in the creative profession claim to have mild to severe anxiety from time to time and 56% claim mild to severe depression.
>I think these mental health struggles can be challenging for people in positions like you, when you're in a leadership role because of what leadership requires. People are looking to you and following your lead. Confusion or struggle can seem like weakness. In your more paranoid moments, you may even fear that your struggles might be used against you, to discount or even undermine your role
>but when you think of sometimes people have gifts on one dimension and gifts almost always come at a price. I think our field has a higher incidence of people who have these creative, superpowers that come at a price. Often that price shows up as some form of mental health issue.
>There's something about the creative field that the people who succeed are the ones who absorb everything around them. Then they use that information and they find patterns or they find anti-patterns and they break those.
>There's no way to do the creativity that we're talking about without absorbing all of this stuff around you. It's like you have your phone that's beeping at you all the time and you can't turn it off. It's like your own version of hell.
#108