So let's talk about depression and anxiety!
Now I know you guys are probably thinking "Oh naw we aren't about to go down the dark path of despair" and naw we're not. I'm not gonna drag you guys through an examination of the two mental disorders that plague a lot of people in the world. Like that's not what my blog is about.
Wait what is my blog about anyway? I haven't made a post in like two years or sthg.
BUT lets talk about these two things in correlation to creativity.
In short: They suck.
Okay, everyone go home, that's the gist of this post, have a nice night! But really though they suck hardcore and most of the time make it hard for a person to create anything substantial (though some people are able to feed off of these soul sucking issues and create beautiful things). The problem isn't always whether or not your work will turn out awesome, in fact most of the time it's more akin to getting motivated enough to create.
And of course you can have this problem without being depressed or experiencing any emotional turbulence. There are days where I feel awesome and like nothing can stop me. But do I write or draw?
Now why is that??? There's nothing really blocking my mentally, I've had a decent day, I've got some time on my hands and yet I find myself watching youtube count down videos, taking unnecessary care of my lions on Lioden, surfing Tumblr or sleeping. Do you know how much I sleep? Too much, my friends, too much.
No, I think there are a plethora of things that stop me and a lot of people from writing even if they're feeling good. One of which is feeling like whatever we create is going to turn out lackluster. This can also be a part of depression, but I don't think it always is. I think it can be heavily linked to self-esteem though.
So in the past year or two I came to this stark realization that I was battling depression. Never mind anxiety because it's precoded into my system as a bonafide General Anxiety Disorder that I take medication for. But after months of slacking off of doing what I love, looking at myself in the mirror and feeling displeased with how I looked, feeling like an annoyance to people, and sleeping a lot the realization slapped me across the face and I couldn't believe I hadn't seen it sooner.
I was depressed, for probably the first time in my life, actually. Now I was depressed during my parents divorce, and I guess depression takes on a lot of different forms. I was more anxious than anything, but nonetheless my creativity didn't stall. I was still writing and had started taking up drawing comics. They were outlets for a crap time.
Then I ask myself as an adult "Why can't they be outlets now?" easy: I've been kicked in the shins by "critics". I started to see the flaws in my work, not only because of what they said but also because my perspective has evolved with age. I used to have an unshakeable bravado when it came to my writing. I was hot shit, basically. And, heck, I was! I wrote what I want and how I wanted it and people liked it! I had friends who wanted to read my work and family too. I was posting junk on fanfiction.net for a long time and people on there loved it. I felt like a super star and felt like I had found my niche in the world with a God given talent that I cherished and held in high regard.
So fast forward to age 19...2012, right? Something like that. I go into NanoWriMo all fired up. Only I fell face first for the first time in my life. I didn't like how my writing sounded. It had sounded awesome up until that point. Really, it was just that the story had no solid direction and thus I was struggling to lead it, or let it lead me. Still I had never had that issue before and it left me shell-shocked. To top it off a group on Tumblr turned down my entrance into their fanfiction group. It was quite stupid, actually. My friend had been in the group at the time and was watching as they praised my work quite highly. She got up to go to the bathroom and when she came back there was a resounding "No" in their conversation. Suddenly they had turned around and pinpointed everything they didn't like. It was startling for my friend, and when I got the rejection email I was appalled.
Characters were not in character--go watch the show again.
Structure isn't up to snuff
I think there was something else but I can't remember. Those were the two things that obviously stuck with me.
NOW. This group of self-glorified hoo-has were all probs about my age at the time (there was probably one in their late twenties at least). And they essentially said the exact opposite of what everyone else in the fandom had said to me. The particular story I had submitted to them has over 20,000 views on fanficiton.net alone. It had been well received and people eagerly awaited updates.
I'd also like to add that in the email I was sent they said specifically not to mention any of the contents to anyone.
I won't go mentioning the group name, of course, because that would just be darksided of me.
So I struggle to recover from these two blows--one self inflicted and one that was me being butt-hurt over what some tiny fanfiction group said about my writing.
This is around the time the depression really starts to kick in. My dad was getting remarried. I was starting at a new university. My mom lost her job. My dog died. My weight was thrown into light. Actually a lot of this stuff happened about a year after the NaNo incident. But it just kept bogging me down.
So cue this past academic school year. Two of my writing classes were essentially shit. The kind of shit where in one class everyone is thrown under the bus by getting harsh critiques from your classmates on a story everyone pretty much legit just wrote a week before (if not the night before), and you were expected to crank out New York Times Best Seller list stuff in your first draft and submit it to the professor. You also lost 1/3 of a letter grade for every typo he found. So there was that. Don't get me wrong, criticism is an important medicine we have to learn to take. But the professor was also pompous, and the class was very polarizing. People either hated it or loved it.
I got F's on both of my submissions. I was devastated by the second one most. I had gone through what he had said I did wrong in my first work, and tried to conform to his requirements. I had my dad go through it and catch all the typos and fragments (my paper was covered in green ink by the time he was through). I got an email from the professor after he graded it. He gave me an F. He said that I had great ideas and such, but ultimately I hadn't learned a thing in his class.
So my first emotion is rage, right?
I was so livid. I was convinced that I had wasted my time in this person's class and actually tried my hardest. I felt like he tried to shove his techniques down my throat and that if I didn't write THIS EXACT WAY that I would never be published, and if I was it wouldn't be
good.
So that was the first stage of my emotions. The second stage came about 15 minutes later.
Ab-solute anguish. Why? Mostly because immediately after I tried to write something to prove to myself that I had been doing the right things all along without that class. But it sounded weird. But I thought it was just me and my self-conscious issue that I had been having BEFORE the class. I sent it to a friend and even she said it didn't sound like me. It sounded forced.
I broke. I started sobbing loudly because I thought I
lost it. My beloved ability to create through words and my ability to evoke emotion just by a sentence was gone and thus so was my identity and my purpose.
I was almost convinced that this class had sucked out whatever else I had left in me and had ruined me. I sat there crying so loudly, asking my poor, confused little dog, "Dandy, WHY?!"
In another grappling effort I bitterly wrote something, tears still jogging down my face and my nose stopped up. I sent it to my friend and she said "That's my girl."
I hadn't lost it. But it had been severely stunted.
My second writing class was better. The criticism was less harsh and so was the grading criteria. We mostly all wrote in comedies, which was new for me. Everyone loved my comedic pieces--many of which somehow pertained to my part time job. Quite a few of us agreed that the professor sometimes spoke from his butt though. He said my last piece lacked emotional core (which was bullcrap because everyone I talked to about it didn't understand what he meant since it was loaded with emotion), and he even flat out said one girl's work was boring. To which everyone in the room looked at him like he was crazy and we all vehemently protested.
A lot of things contributed to my personal depression, including classes that took a shot at my shaky writing-self-esteem.
Then of course there's daily stress that accumulates until you find yourself sobbing and eating an entire box of mac and cheese by yourself (but I do that regardless if I feel sad or not so there ya go).
I guess what I really want to say is that it's okay to take a break. It's okay to do you (as Justyne would put it). You can focus on what you need to fix in your life. You don't have to be published by the end of the year or paint a Mona Lisa famous painting in a month.
Breathe.
Criticism is a thing and some of it is fair, and we have to learn to take it (I'm still learning, myself). But you're entitled to sift through what people say and label it as "Horseshit", "Pending", and "Acceptable". Yes, YOU are allowed to do that and it doesn't make you a shitty writer if you don't take all the criticism you receive and put it into your work. You take what you think is sound-- but don't assume that you're perfect. You need a big ass ego, sure, but you also need to know when to be humble. It's good to look at things from another person's perspective and say "You know, you've got a point" or just "Nah, bro." and move on.
You write what you want. Write about cupcakes waging a war on muffins and how a muffin and a cupcake fall in love and create a baby that's just a muffin with frosting. Write it in first, second, or third person. Make fragments. Start sentences with But. Stack punctuations?!
"You do you." has probably been the best advice I've ever gotten from Shteen, and I repeat it to myself at times.
So if I'm gonna do me. I need to think about it as such and just write. Don't think about how it's gonna sound as soon as it hits the page--revisions come later-- just write and breathe.
Everything's gonna be okay. Take your time to recover from blows to your self esteem, but never stop. Take time to take care of yourself, and take time trying to find yourself again if you have to.
You do you!
Ps. Here's
Shteen's blog. It's full of wisdom. And a touch of derp. <3
