I was listening recently to a radio interview with Philipe Petit - magician, juggler, wire-walker, artist, inspirational speaker - on the topic of creativity, the subject of his most recent book. At the time I was treating myself to a slow drive through the hill country west of Austin on a beautiful spring day. I had no goal or destination in mind; there was nothing that I wanted or needed. I had some thought that I might practice learning to take landscape photographs, but as it turned out I never took my tripod out of the car.
The interview with Petit was being broadcast to coincide with the opening of the 9/11 Memorial in New York, since Petit will always be remembered as the man who strung a tightrope between the two towers shortly before the World Trade Center opened. He spent 45 minutes on the wire over 1300 feet in the air, but it was his description of what it was like to take the first step was so powerful it sent me to the video of his TED talk as soon as I got home. http://on.ted.com/psNj
What a brilliant combination of essential topics: creativity, and the overpowering prospect of taking the first step.
Strange as it may seem, taking the first step can be pretty scary even if we're talking about taking a step toward transforming a nasty stack of shit into something we actually like living with. You would think that people would be chomping at the bit to reduce that stinking heap and make something usable out of it.
But a wound can become a familiar thing, and hurting can become a familiar way of being, and humans are resilient enough to re-shape themselves around a hurt without even noticing. Kind of like the way you adjust to a back injury by altering your posture until your doctor or chiropractor takes a look and says, Wow, your back is a mess!
You've become so accustomed to walking & sitting & driving & sleeping that way, that you don't even notice how jacked up your back has become. And fixing it is going to take some effort.
Same with your pile of shit, especially the ones that have been on your table for a while. They may be unpleasant, but they're yours; and it's impossible to know what life will be like without them. At least you have something familiar to trace your unhappiness to.
It's amazing, now that I'm tapping away on this blog, how many stories I am seeing about peoples' recoveries from trauma. They're all over the place. Why don't you go find one right now? You can even look up a story about someone who was handed a pile of shit almost exactly like yours, or even a bigger more horrible one. The internets are wonderful for stuff like this: you never have to be the only one that this terrible thing has happened to. Go. I'll wait.
Okay, let's be all cognitive-behavioral for a minute. Write down all the reasons why you absolutely cannot do what that person did to transform their pile(s) of shit into something way better than stinky shit.
Cross out all the reasons that are realistic, practical, and unchangeable. Like I really can't stretch a tightrope between two skyscrapers and walk across in order to have a life-altering experience. (I did, however, roll out of an airplane once with a parachute guy strapped to my back, and that was a life-altering experience, I can tell you.) I can't afford to sail around the world for my healing; heck, I can't even sail a boat. And as long as I have my husband I can't move to Italy unless I want to go without him, which I do not.
So I get the fact that not everything is doable by everybody. I get that.
But let's agree to set aside the "can't" word, okay? It really is unhelpful. Each and every one of us actually can do a whole lot of things. And I happen to believe that you can in fact make something out of your pile of shit.
I was just telling someone about an experience I had as a young therapist-in-training at a psychiatric hospital. I was working with a very depressed young man who was complaining about how depressed he was and rather wailing about not knowing what could he do, what could he do?
You could shower and comb your hair, I told him. (I was being trained in Reality Therapy at the time.) Needless to say he did not appreciate my suggestion. However, my supervisor thought it was brilliant and I myself even now think it wasn't half bad. Because even a terribly depressed person who is carrying around a big pile of shit can in fact do things. Having been that person at times, I realize you don't want to do those things, and you may even believe you can't do those things; I realize also that it's hard to believe that doing something like taking a shower and combing your hair is even worth doing when you feel as awful as you do.
But turning your pile of shit into something you don't mind living with is going to involve taking one or two steps you don't really feel like taking. And the first steps may not make you feel like you've made a whole lot of progress. Shit transformation can take time. Trust me here.
So what if it takes time? A year from now you can look back and see progress, or you can look back and see the same old same. Got a preference here?
To go back to cognitive-behavioral world, you might now make a list of things you can do, no matter how trivial they may seem to you. For example, I know for a fact you can read or we wouldn't be having this discussion. You can probably write. You can perhaps see, or hear, or both. Maybe you can sing. Or cook. Or fix a washing machine. Or find bargains like no one's business. You can certainly color: I just ordered three coloring books for grown-ups from Amazon a minute ago.
What are some things you like to do? (If you are feeling really crappy, what are some things you used to like to do when you were feeling better?)
What are some things you would like to learn to do, if only it were possible? What are some skills, talents, or arts that you admire?
You get what we're doing here: we're figuring out a place to start turning your shit into something you can live with. We're about to get creative.
Creativity. How many people say, I don't have a creative bone in my body. I'm just not a creative person.
Let me tell you a little bit about creativity from an old-fashioned psychoanalytic perspective. If you are modern enough to have a functional MRI machine in your garage, great; you can go read your brain activity while you do something creative and look at creativity from a purely neurological perspective. But for me, psychoanalytic theory helps with a few metaphors that can come in handy now and then.
In a nutshell, what's needed for creativity to happen is for you to allow yourself to "dip down" into the part of your psyche that makes no rational sense at all (this would be your id, if you're wanting to name names). It is the part of you that dreams, that gets scared for no reason at all, that wants to misbehave in the craziest ways, that is 100% child, that wants to keep that wallet you found at the checkout stand with all those $20 bills in it, that wants to throw a tantrum when the bank line is too long. It's the part of you that laughs at Jim Carrey movies and amputee jokes. It's the part of you with no manners at all, and absolutely no regard for the rules.
When you can dip down into that rich mother lode of your mind, then "come back up" into your rational mind to make something out of the excursion, you're practicing creativity.
Here's what I'm saying: if your pile of shit is giving you nightmares, wake up and paint them. If your pile of shit is making you angry and locking you into a nasty mood, take your nasty mood to the gym and get on the treadmill and stomp the face of the person who hurt you with every foot fall until you can't take another step. Grab your camera and go take some photos you would never think of taking. Just go, just do it. Anybody can tear pictures out of magazines and make a collage, and you are a member of "anybody." Grab a hunk of clay and let your hands do whatever they want with it.
Go all-out child with the artistic stuff. If you watch little kids drawing pictures, most of them will be completely unfazed if the chimney is crooked or the house is way out of proportion to the tree. They draw the sky as an inch of blue on top, the ground an inch of green, the rest of the background solid white with puffy clouds. They can make a "mistake" and keep right on drawing. This is what you're aiming for: fire the censors in your head.
Pay attention to how you feel the whole time. This is important. Think of Philip Petit putting his foot on that wire, about to walk for the first time across a wire he had not anchored to the other side with his own hands.
Once you have taken a small step connecting your shit with a creative act of any kind, take a few minutes to associate what you've created with your pile of shit. Be specific.
"This painting is all red because I have sweated blood over the shit that happened to me for the past fifteen years. You can't see the red because I painted over it with black. That's because I can't see anything beyond the bleeding."
"I'm stiff and sore and in need of a bath because I stomped the shit out of that asshole and now my body is exhausted and I'm feeling muscles I haven't felt in years. Fuck that asshole."
"These pictures have no people in them. That's because my shit pile has turned me into a lonely person. I have no one."
Get my drift?
You don't have to be "creative." What you need to create here is simply merely specifically what is already inside of you. You do not have to be an artist.
If you hate what you have created, tie that to your pile of shit as well.
"This painting sucks and so does this two-ton pile of shit I've been carrying around all this time."
"I made this collage for you, motherfucker, and it's so ugly I'm cutting it into pieces and putting the pieces in the shredder."
"I am keeping these photos in a special album on my computer labeled 'Sorrow.' I may never look at them again."
There is nothing about this that you can do wrong, aside from doing nothing.
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