The Emotional Cost of Creativity

As a society, we ill-define creativity regularly and often. Creativity isn't merely anchored to a single forward-thinking idea, or a unique composition, or even serial entrepreneurs.

Creativity is the soulful application of your deepest talents being distinctly utilized to inspire emotion, connection, aspiration, and peacefulness for all that experience it, but most of all, the Creator itself. This definition of creativity and the process that it exists within is one very rarely discussed. Creativity is and has always been a cryptic interaction with all that is, the universe we inhabit, and the communities we call home. It is not without confusion and mystery for clarity is what is sought through creativity but not immediately realized, if ever.

New-age millennials tend to be obsessed with creative power and having complete autonomy over any aspects of their job functions; however basic they may be. There are dozens of articles from major publications decreeing that this generation is unlike any that has come before and even those that have come after. 

The problem with this ideology is that it leads to being more engaged with the idea of creative expression and control over the way the expression manifests, more than the dedication to original and provocative ideas being brought to light. 

The term “creative” has now been so overused that anyone that breaks the mold of “normalcy” and deviates in any way is awarded a politically correct get out of jail free card and crowns themselves a creative.

But, calling yourself a creative without any concrete manifestations of creativity is like calling yourself a master before you have surpassed a foundational technique of your craft.

There are many sacrifices associated with authentic creativity and, indeed, assuming the life of a creator. Creativity is a lifelong journey, not simply an inkling or desire to create something once. It is a divine pull within a soul that requires them to continuously and unequivocally create -- regardless of the cost or burden. To truly be creative, you must understand no single creation is ever fully realized or complete. In some ways, the incompleteness of creativity is a sacrifice. A resolve to starting something you may never understand or visualize an end to. Creation is to completion what birth is to life. Just because you are born, does not mean you know how to fully live, and just because you can create, does not make you a creator. The nuances are vital here, because without them, the sweat equity that must be channeled into the work can become impossible to understand and even more difficult to maintain. 

Time is priceless, for it is finite throughout our mortality; and to begin something that will never be complete is a sickly sweet from of torture. Something that gives you energy but consumes your power greedily is of a high cost to not only the human body but the psyche. Sanity is a sensitive matter indeed, and authentic creativity takes you the very brink of psychosis or the clinical insanity as it merges to aspects of the self that truly cannot exist in full on the same plane. Nor can it be easily understood by the absolute wordly.

In other words, creativity is literally and purely magic and it cannot be conjured without a deep reverence and connection to the divine.