Identify the Source
I'm way late this month, but there's a reason for that. A maelstrom of life events collided into one other, and I was left feeling like the inner hype-man, the battery that wants to supercharge myself and the world around me, was empty. Cold. Dead.
It has been so gloomy out these past few weeks that I couldn't even rely on the sun to send down some rays and give me a boost. Like Superman trapped under a red sun, I had nothing in the tank.
But it's okay. After one last grueling week, I was able to find that spark.
For the past 9 months, I have been going to therapy every other week. It's been refreshing, and I've left most of my sessions with a better perspective and sense of self than when I walked in.
One of the tools I've learned in therapy is to identify the emotions fueling my decisions or actions. When overwhelmed, I’m to say what I'm feeling and commit to exploring the tumult of emotions (because there are usually more than one in play at any given time). It's not a cure-all, but it's been helpful to better understand, ease, and manage everything that’s been going on.
I recommend it, and I’ve found that the idea behind it is something that can be applied in ways beyond self-regulation, especially pertaining to creativity.
On a creative level, it's common for writers, artists, etc. to let negative self-talk or their own criticisms get in the way of releasing an art piece. It's easy to withhold something we've poured so much of ourselves into, instead acquiescing to the voice telling us that our work is "no good," "derivative," or "not worthy."
When this inner voice wins, we don’t dig further and identify where this talk is coming from. We don't look behind the voice and bring the fears, frustrations, and other emotions fueling this negative self-talk to light. In lacking to do so, we can't address those feelings, nor can we understand or fully deal with the source of what's at work, which means we can't free ourselves to create. In a nutshell, as creators, we may find ourselves hardwired to ignore all the motivation, excitement, and determination that pushes us to create in lieu of a line or two of negative self-talk that seemingly wasn't there when we were engaged in the act of creation.
And we shouldn't allow that to happen. We worked too hard to blindly listen to negativity without diving deep and exploring where it came from. Think about it. How many hours did you put into a project that you shelved during a moment of perceived imposter syndrome? Your work deserves more than that.
This idea of identifying the source also works on a societal level.
At the end of a long, frustrating week, I had an interview with a comic writer that I am a huge fan of. We talked about his current run on Detective Comics, and in the conversation, we discussed how, as a society, people often use catch-all words to excuse blame. For example, for environmental disasters, one might say that "corporations are destroying the planet." While that is true in some cases, the statement doesn't elaborate further and name the corporations. More importantly, it doesn't put human faces and identities behind those decisions. In using a nameless entity, we haven't fully identified the source of the problem, which permits it to continue, and at some point, choices and decisions like this can instill systemic issues where nameless ideas, entities, or figureheads rule our problems and never get solved.
I bring this up not to rail on systemic problems but to provide an example that could prove beneficial for a story. Imagine a socio-political thriller where a journalist uncovered a plot to poison a town's water supply. What if, once the journalist saw the corporate logo on the barrels of waste pouring into the reservoir, said journalist called it a day? What if, instead of pursuing the decisions that led to this environmental disaster, making phone calls and getting the names of every executive involved in the decision, the journalist simply clicked submit on their piece and moved on?
It would be a pretty open-ended and underwhelming story, right? By that story’s rules, the right people wouldn’t get their day in court, either. That's why we need to identify the source. In this case, it's the source of a calamity, the source of very real, human decisions that doomed a town, and it’s the answer to the who, where, what, and why of a story.
More importantly, taking a moment to identify what we’re feeling, what we’re seeing, and everything that’s behind those emotions and sensations is a way for us to explore deeper. It’s a way for us to prod, poke, and dig both internally and externally, collecting ideas and lessons that can better fuel both the stories of our lives and the narratives on the page.
In the words of legendary hand model J.P. Prewitt, "Keep pulling the sweater. Eventually the whole thing will unravel."
We're all in this together,
Scott
P.S. Last issue, I mentioned an interview I had with a Batman movement double. You can listen to that interview here.
Great post.