Creativity

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It turns out I am substantially right-brained. My being an artist you wouldn’t be blamed for imagining that I might be slightly thrown in discovering that I am not so much inclined toward creativity. But I have known for a long time that I do not have a good imagination.

Little things like the large amount of time it takes me to compose a witty text message - or any text for that matter - are good hints of this deficit. I have to really concentrate in order to fabricate anything; am I trying to be someone else? Should I have to strain to come up with a reply to a post on Facebook?

Or is it my illness that prevents me from processing things because I have fled my head as a way of dealing with (by which I mean avoiding) the distress of being in there?

I don’t know.

Should you embrace who you are? I realise that – for one reason or another – I am not very creative. I need to write things down in order to process them properly which, as you can imagine, isn’t very convenient for me; but it is simply how it must be at the moment.

I enjoy making art; I want to jog people out of the stupor of their everyday lives and help them see beyond their horizons. This is probably a very naïve way of looking at things but it is the way that they appear to me.

I see people who don’t have the mental capacity or even the natural inclination to realise that they have been blinkered. It saddens me but I do not blame them. It has crossed my mind that I may be able to observe things from a different vantage because my antipsychotic medication numbs my feeling and makes me more cold and logical; in which case were I not being medicated I would probably be as short-sighted as them!

That isn’t a bad thing but it is in a way. It seems to me that there is so much that is wrong with our world that could be solved if people were to simply wake up.

Or perhaps it is me who needs to wake up. What if we can’t run the world on renewable, clean energy? What if the government isn’t corrupted by the oil companies? Is it true that world hunger really cannot be solved? Is it a lie that advanced technology is being held back so that more money can be made? Do we even need money? Is the prescription of medication not just another money-making scheme? 

Imagination

Female genital mutilation

Today I read that in experiments, people with Schizophrenia have less imagination than controls. That doesn’t surprise me judging from personal experience. I would not count myself as very in tune with my creativity. Things with me tend to follow a more logical pathway. I met some artists this weekend just gone at an open studios event and it struck me how much more instinctual they were in their approach to life.

My art is worked very hard whereas to them it seems to come naturally. A while ago I realised that my process was mechanical: I record as much as I can in writing and then I review what I have written; noticing patterns, motifs and symbols. I then mould these things into my art work.

I have always been capable at drawing. I have been doing it all my life and I have very few inhibitions when it comes to putting pen to paper. I have experimented and found my own rhythm so it is now almost second nature to me.

I do not envy these instinctual artists because I am who I am; I didn’t choose to be me so why make excuses or pretend to be something I am not; like men feeling embarrassed in the shower at the gym. When I was younger I would look at different people and I’d think “I will be like them”, as though it is possible to fundamentally change who you are.

There may be some leeway I guess; people do change over time as new connections are formed in the brain. Or there are drastic cases of brain damage when an individual can become a completely different person.

I am a particular collection of thoughts. I feel as though I am a being amid a cloud of thoughts; picking them out consciously but I think that is an illusion. There is no ‘me’, there is only the cloud of thoughts that believes it self to be a person.