A requiem for your creations that've sat for too long.
Both finished and unfinished projects can give way to chronic grief, but there's a way to cope
I struggle with follow-through, which is of course a completely unremarkable issue to have. I mean, who doesn’t have to work their way up to a certain flow and work their way around snags with motivation and (what we refer to as) self-sabotage, right? Lately, though, I think I’ve stumbled ass-backwards into some realizations that can be of service. I feel pressed to share and help others apply them as a form of… I don’t know, some kind of at-home first-aid regimen, perhaps.
Since my late teens (and even way earlier in a slightly different form), the timbre of my day-to-day existence has been a constant state of creative inspiration being beamed into my head constantly. Musical ideas, storylines, film sequences, music videos, stage dialogues, essay passages, monologues — lots and lots of thoughts in raw-material form — are always emerging as if through a portal that’s beaming transmissions directly into my head.
It’s a wonderful, even miraculous natural resource to be in touch with, as steady a presence for me as the sun and the moon and the air we breathe. And therein lies the problem: these ideas tend to come rushing at me like a water hose set on full blast, with different streams of water spraying in every direction. It’s hard to organize, or to wrangle-down into any kind of orderly system for receiving it. It gets overwhelming, and it’s very easy to trip so that entire sequence gets backlogged.
The truth is that I feel like I’m perpetually behind, which is genuinely painful and damaging on a number of levels. Throw parenting and routine life obligations into the mix and, well, it’s not a pretty picture. At a certain point, I developed a dim sense that all three of those domains kind of merge into one, and there I times where I feel like just kind of being able to sustain Mr. Miyagi’s “wax-on/wax-off” prescription in any area carries over into the other two.
Lately, I’ve been feeling a lot of “Well, you showed up today — and that’s enough.” But what I wanted to draw attention to here is the feeling we get when we uncover something we made or started making, maybe a long time ago or maybe somewhat recently. Either we finished it and it just kind of sat there, or we left it in a state of incompletion. For me, blowing the dust off is a lot like going into the attic or basement and opening an old box.
I get flooded with sensations, mostly a powerful sense of mourning and regret, like there was a life form I once held so much hope for and now it’s dead. I know many, many artists in this position. In my career as a journalist, I’ve found myself over the years saying the same thing to artists — even successful ones — coping with postpartum disappointment: “You made something, and there’s something honorable just in the fact that you saw it through.”
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The other night, I was speaking to a pastor friend who I met through our shared love of a band I recorded over 20 years ago. The band’s forward momentum stalled-out over a decade ago, and it seems to me that what they accomplished kind of hangs over their individual lives like a gray, overcast sky. I was thinking aloud about how great it would be to be able to procure a proper mastering of the full-length we did, and it occurred to me that all they’d hear is the death of their hopes.
At one point, this band was filled with a sense of youthful aspiration. They, like so many other young bands who spend their free time in basements, garages, and dilapidated rehearsal spaces crafting their material, opened themselves up to the possibility that their music would carry them into the ecosystem of bands who recorded and toured as their actual job. The thing is, though, the music itself isn’t dead by any means. On the contrary…
I said to my pastor friend that, with all the music-nerd types online who enjoy hunting for obscure stuff, you have to figure there are at least a hundred people who would find this music and love it. All it would take is for one of them to send an e-mail saying “this music got me through a very difficult time; I can’t tell you how much it means to have discovered it.” My friend and I agreed: if that happened, the band’s feelings on this entire chapter of their lives would shift.
At first, my friend suggested that artists and bands need to have funeral rite-type ceremonies for their works of art. I agreed that some kind of ritual is a good idea, but that rather than throwing dirt on something you’re burying in the backyard, that it helps to leave the door open for what you made to live again. Yes, I was consciously making a Christ/resurrection parallel, but that doesn’t have to mean anything to you for this to work.
To that one person who connects with what you made, the work is very much alive and well in the present. To that, my pastor friend added, “and in that sense, it’s immortal, because it will continue to live.” Amen!
As for those of us with piles of unfinished items, or those of us who are blocked, who no longer feel inclined to pick up an instrument or paintbrush or whatever it is: I see you. My relationship with making music has always been fraught with an intense amount of inner turmoil. I’ll sometimes go years without making anything. Lately, I found myself questioning, not without a heavy sense of disappointment, whether I’d ever even been a musician at all.
I’ve often observed something that I’ll repeat here: if some aspect of your creativity sits dormant in your system for years, it’s like having dead tissue floating around in your bloodstream. It feels poisonous, like this vital aspect of you feels necrotized. But here’s the thing: if you find yourself able to start turning that rusty faucet knob back on, it’s like you get all that time’s worth right back. It’s uncanny. And I speak from experience.
All of a sudden, you find yourself back in the doing and you’re like “Oh wow, this never actually left. Here I was picturing my life as if a limb of my being had been severed and it was here all along, just waiting to be nudged and massaged back into activity.”
So yes, living with creativity means having to contend with grief — that just comes with the territory. But we can look at our inspiration as living independently of time. We can always turn back to it.
I’m here for you. Seriously. Reach out.
<3 SRK