The Passion of Giving Birth

Whenever I try to write fiction I realize that I don’t care… don’t have enough to say, don’t have the passion to commit to giving birth to a new creation. I’d like to, sure. I’d love to have my Neuromancer, meaning that I’d love to have a book I wrote that I could point to and be proud of. But I recognize that to achieve that takes many things, chief among them is the energy to birth it.

I think all creative people, all producers anyway, the ones that actually do the work to create the artifact that others marvel over, I think they’re all just a little bit adrift of the median in some specific way. I just searched and apparently there is research that suggests a link between creativity and higher mental illness. I’ve often thought that the people who can take the difficult steps to actually produce something are the ones who can push through the discomfort of creativity.

I don’t think that one must be neurodivergent to be creative, but I think it helps in that aspect of life.

This is mostly just coming from the realization that a lot of the peace in my life that I’ve acquired over the last couple of years has, in turn, come from the realization that for a very long time I was under an absolutely unreasonable, crushing amount of multiple types of stress, and underneath the apparent pathology that stress represented was really just an underdeveloped normie with a high sensitivity to other people’s emotional states.

That said, I also refuse to believe that one needs to have some sort of mental illness in order to be creative, and I also don’t want this to sound like I think being neurodivergent is some sort of super power. I’ve seen people use it as one in certain situations, and then seen the mess it makes of the rest of their life, seen them wish for what they themselves termed as “normalcy.”

I know the saying the grass is always greener on the other side is meant to be understood as “The grass you’re standing on is greener to the person on the side of the mountain that you’re looking at.” Meaning that, somebody else is looking at your situation wishing it was theirs in just the same way you might be looking at someone else’s situation and wondering if it would do you better than your current surroundings.

We always want what we don’t have, or look externally for our failings. If I just had, that talent, that thing, it’s not me, see, it’s this something else, this certain je ne sais quoi as the French would say, it’s that, that’s what’s missing. It’s not me, I’m not to blame.

It is interesting though, the correlation between “madness” and creativity. Perhaps it just really is that you have to be “mad” enough to breathe life into an idea. And maybe neurodivergence makes it easier to be that kind of mad, or really, maybe it seems perfectly reasonable to someone with a different kind of brain to do the creative thing.

Whatever it is, I hope I acquire the creative kind of madness one day, even for a little while. Just a taste. Just enough to finish one good book.