Creativity and mental health are intricately connected, but the two subjects are rarely ever written about together in a positive light. Creative genius is more often associated with dysfunction that it is with a healthy, beautiful and fulfilling life. Stories about musicians who died too young, artists that go penniless and writers that struggle to get published are all commonplace tropes that are glamorized into a mythology around what it means to be creative. 

I can’t stand this mythology. Not only is it far from an accurate portrayal, it also damages the very same people it claims to glorify. 

For the last several years I’ve spent a lot of time and energy focused on how to stay mentally healthy - as a musician - as well as making the argument that it’s not necessary to “suffer” to be an artist - mentally, emotionally, or financially. But, in my eagerness to bust this “starving, sick artist” mentality wide open, I overlooked an important and related angle to this story.  

The mental health-creativity connection is less like a straight line and more like a feedback loop. 

While it’s fairly obvious that our mental health affects our creativity, it can be less obvious how our creativity (or lack thereof) is affecting our overall well-being. The way we incorporate creativity into our lives can either be a key pillar supporting our happiness and mental health or the very thing that perpetually chips away at our inner peace. 

When I first started writing, it was primarily about mental health and musicians. After dealing with my own mental health journey through anxiety and depression, I realized I was in good company. Musicians fundamentally neglect their mental health, but the neglect ran so much deeper than I thought. At some point, it became impossible to tell where the mental health issues stopped and where the life issues began.

As I got healthier, I began to find myself pushing creativity away.

Here's what I discovered: at the point where you have done everything to treat the anxiety and depression, and you are still having trouble, it’s time to take a look at your lifestyle and the way creativity is incorporated into your daily life. 

No one is exempt from needing to re-examine their own creative expression - absolutely no one. This applies to professional creatives, amateurs, and even people who would never, ever dare to identify themselves as creative in any way. Just because you are a professional musician or artist doesn’t mean you are actually expressing what you most long to bring into the world. Conversely, just because you aren’t a “professional” capital-C Creative type doesn’t mean you have nothing creative to express. 

I recently was revisiting one of Brene Brown’s earlier books, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are, and was intrigued to discover that for a long time in her adult life she not only didn’t believe she was creative, but actively dismissed it and pushed it away. She says, “the older I got, the less value I put on creativity and the less time I spent creating. When people asked me about crafting or art or creating, I replied on the standard, ‘I’m not the creative type.’ On the inside, I was really thinking, Who has time for painting and scrapbooking and photography when the real work of achieving and accomplishing needs to be done.”  As her research began to shift towards studying happy, fulfilled and resilient people, her thoughts on the subject of creativity changed. It was clear as she began to put together a beautiful definition for what it means to be “wholehearted”, that creativity, play and rest emerged as pivotal, key components to a fulfilled life. As Brown eloquently puts it: “if we want to make meaning, we need to make art.” 

Ugly art. Bad art. 

But... this is uncomfortable...  and so we dance around the discomfort and evade expressing what’s inside of us. “What if it sucks?” presents itself in our minds as a question to stop us dead in our tracks, rather than a point of inquiry to begin a new undertaking. 

If we aren’t careful, creative neglect can present itself as being the responsible, practical and mature thing to do.

Here are some of the ways it operates covertly in our lives: 

• Procrastination and avoidance, veiled as “so many demands” on our time 

• Distancing from the true self by condemning it as “childish behavior” 

• Absolute thinking - “it’s either I’m creative and broke or a functioning adult that has no fun” (this is a very, very common one and I wrestle with it myself) 

So, how do we stop these behaviors from running our lives? 

Put them to the test. Challenge them. Question them. How is it helping you to behave like this? Question your own assumptions and try the opposite assumption on for size. What if being creative and happy actually made you better at the rest of your “adult” life? What if being playful and well-rested leads to you making more money? 

We humans are very, very good at constructing narratives around poor quality data. We find one story and build an entire novel around what it means, ignoring the fact that it’s anecdotal evidence and has no bearing on our own specific life. 

Ok, so what do we do? Drop everything and paint a Jackson Pollock painting in our living room? 

No, please don’t (unless you really want to). 

We start by connecting the dots between mental health and well-being and creativity, We begin to show these things the respect they deserve in our lives. We cannot thrive as individuals - even with the best health care - without expressing the fullness of who we are. 

It starts with small steps in the right direction, just like any self-care practice starts with incremental change. We can actually think of creativity like we think of going to the gym. In the same way that you wouldn’t run and curl 50lb dumbbells if you’ve never worked out before, you probably aren’t going to start writing your screenplay and sell it in 2 weeks if you haven’t even journaled in the last 10 years. 

Baby steps.

One day at a time. 

If you can’t even figure out where to begin on the making/creating front - ask yourself this simple question: what has gone unexpressed in your life?  

Start there. Get curious. Explore. 

What if you let yourself open up to life a little more? What if you were more playful about it all? What if you followed your curiosity? 

Yes, it could go wrong. You could make a mistake. But, eventually, your life very well might end up looking like a work of art. 

That’s something worth stumbling imperfectly towards.