Creativity, mental issues and eccentricity, what's the connection?

This is what I do with my free time. I think about stuff.
Right now I am very fascinated by creativity as a phenomenon. What is it? And how is it connected to an individuals personality? I find myself in a the classic "chicken or egg"-situation. And why is mental issues such a common thing within the creative sphere? Also, there is a high percentage of introverted individuals within the same community. Why?

I will look into this further, but I'm posting my starting point, my hypothesis.

As I was talking about in my post Creativity demands creativity, creativity is a need or urge, not just a hobby or a want. To me it's then rather obvious why the mental issues have such high representation within this group of people. Were you not to find your "out", perhaps you are left unable to create due to writer's block, performance anxiety, exhaustion or any other reason. Anyway, this could, as I was getting at in the earlier post, drive anybody to the verge of insanity.

Now, if we shall look at the introverts. (something I am sure I will get into several times in future posts)
Introverts have a different view on the world than extroverts. This is actually biological. To make it easy one can say extroverts live directly through their senses. They see, smell, hear things and their senses are taking a short cut through their mind to register and be stored in the right areas. Now introverts on the other hand, they sense things..then that notion is bounced through several areas of their minds before finding the right spot to settle in. All their impressions has to go through the memory bank and all sorts of mind-rooms to be pondered, reflected upon and finally concluded. This is exactly why an introvert so easily tires in social situation. They are simply overwhelmed by all the impressions they have to run through miles and miles of nerve pathways.

Ok, this is all a little much, I hope you're following..

So, is it really that odd that this kind of person might see the world in a very different light? Notice things that otherwise go unnoticed? Then what would you do with this knowledge?
Children experience the world in this way. They have many situations every day where they have to fill in the blanks. They do not understand the connections, they cannot make a conclusion without creating explanations where they are lacking facts. And is there a more creative group of people than children? I'm gonna go ahead and say no. But somehow over the years, we learn to accept that we cannot hold all the facts, we stop questioning and believe we are using common sense where we, I believe, would be better off using a childlike creativity.

My theory is that just as scientists are basing their work on the hypothesis that dreams somehow helps us sort through impressions and that it is a necessary function for our well being, I believe that creativity does the same.
If you receive a million fractions of impressions every day, maybe your need for an out is bigger?
Maybe, if all this external stimuli is bouncing around in your mind, some of it will inevitably get stuck along the way. Just laying there, lingering, with no place to go but out.

So, in a way, creating for a creative person would be the same as dreaming while awake...
Make sense? A little?

I am willing to stand by this, since I know the feeling of getting into it. Sitting down, getting the flow going is almost as relaxing and rejuvenating to me as sleeping. It's my off-button. Though I'm very focused and I'm producing I don't think about anything else in the world. Nothing can really reach me in this state. And it is wonderful.

Wouldn't this also explain why and how some of these people would be seen as eccentric? Very much like "those who dance are considered insane by those who cannot hear the music"?

Obviously not all creative people are introverted, neither are they all suffering from mental issues, but the fact remains that there is a high representation of both. It was also there I started putting things together. I might be so far off in this, I do not know.. but I will find out, and I will let you know.

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The worst possible advice..

"-THINK POSITIVE!"

We've all heard it! We have all suffered the indignity of getting that worn out, worthless cliché thrown in our faces when we least needed it. Just STOP!

Mattias Lundberg, professor in psychology writes in his blog;
"Look around in society and you will notice that you are constantly receiving the message that life gets easier if you think positive. You will go through hardship much easier and you will get opportunities you'd never get. You can read about it in self-help books, listen to inspiring speakers and watch the experts on morning tv describe five simple steps to reach it.
The trend with optimist consultants has been around since the 80s. Shouldn't something have happened by now? Shouldn't we see the result?
But we are feeling worse than ever. Something ain't right here damn it!
It sounds so appealing to think positive, but there is a downside, or perhaps several. Positive thinking is not magical. It does not cure disease, medicine does. It does not create financial stability, planning, budgeting and organizing does.
We have to stop believing that a positive mindset is its own entity. An entity that automatically would grant us happiness."


I myself, have had the questionable pleasure of sitting through one of those optimist-consultant-lectures.. It was not by choice, I can tell you that much. This clown went on for two full hours about the importance of a positive mindset. Using some story about his father being fired as a reference how life always comes around to give you a second chance. He started his two hours of complete bullshit with showing my life-motto on the screen. "Pessimists have only pleasant surprises!" - to prove his point and we were already enemies.

First of all, as any dubbed pessimist will tell you, there are no pessimists. There are optimists, and realists. Pessimist is a term invented by optimists, and as they are not to be trusted I think we can stop listening to what they're saying.

From my realistic point of view, it seems an optimistic mind is quite limited. Cause if you can look at this world, really look at it. Reflect upon what your seeing and still claim to be an optimist, well, your either blind or stupid. Pick one.

Being pessimistic, or as I prefer, realistic doesn't mean you go "Oh crap, that job that I really wanted I'm never gonna get. Cause I suck, the world suck, everything automatically sucks!"
No.. it means you go "I am one out of 200 applicants. I have no idea who I'm competing with. I will most likely not get this job, and I'm not gonna count on it, as lovely as it would be."
I wouldn't know how an optimist would go about it but I imagine something along the lines of "Of course I'm getting it, I'm awesome, who wouldn't hire me? I'm placing an order on a Lamborghini right now!" Slightly exaggerated of course, but you get the gist of it.
Now, what seems like a reasonable approach to you?

Optimism doesn't help you, it only leaves the door open for shit to blindside you in your world of pink clouds.

"A pessimist have only pleasant surprises."
-The only wise thing I heard during my two hours with an optimist-consultant.

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Summertime, and the living is easy..

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Oh Captain, my Captain..

On a serious note, can we talk about depression, anxiety and other mental health issues that are very present in our society, whether we want it or not.
Can we stop for a second and really reflect upon the severity of it?

We're not talking about having a bad day here, we're not talking about being a little sad and we are certainly not talking about something that a person inflict upon themselves.
Before you belittle it, before you add to the stigmatization of it, think on it.


Can you imagine your body turning it's back on you in such a way? Nobody questions the frustration following any other physical illness. Nobody finds it odd that you get angry at your body for not fighting the cancer, giving you migraines or whatever other weirdly, but socially accepted illness. But when a body fails to keep the proper chemical balance for your mood to be stable, suddenly people should just grow up and stop thinking so much about it. What are you, an asshole?

Can you imagine wanting to die? Or actually, I believe very few really wants to die, it's just that they can't find another way out. Can you imagine that? Feeling so trapped, so low, that the only relief you find is to end your own life.
Let the horrific notion of that sink in. You are so beyond what any measure of love, laughter or success could relieve. It's your brain saying "Fuck you! You're not worth any of it!" Sometimes for years on end, all your own mind is telling you is that you're worthless, in a very true meaning of the word, and you have no control over it.

Depression surely is a demon. One that resides within your mind. Claiming your whole life, one piece at a time. Isolating you from everything you hold dear. Constantly whispering in your ear, clawing your insides trying to gain full control. And if he does, well.. he wins, you loose, everyone looses.

Depression could be something that follows a trauma. It is indeed a step in the grieving process for example. It can overcome you when life gets out of control but..and..it can also be a life long struggle independent of external events.

So the next time you are about to open your mouth about someone who's seemingly not doing much of themselves. Pay attention.
Are you sure their behavior is that of someone who could just snap their fingers and "grow up"?
Does sleeping 18hrs/day, barely eating, not finding joy among loved ones or anything in life really, seem healthy to you? Does it seem like something a person would actually choose?
Would you? ...No?
Then what kind of person does it make you, to think that of others?

After Mr Williams untimely passing, I was reading about it. Reading the outpour of love and grief and it stirred up so many feelings from my past. I'd say that I, myself, have seen it closely too many times. Felt that heart-wrenching feeling of absolute helplessness. And I guess, here I am.. later on, with about as much distance as you could muster to these things.. Aiming my anger and frustration at a society that doesn't care to recognize the severity, the pain and the suffering that has hurt people that I so deeply love and have loved.

Previously talking about daring to share your creativity, well, here I go.
I hope you get to hear the song at some point, professionally recorded and ready for your ears but until then, I give you my take on this issue, lyrics only;


Bring Him Back
L.Burlin 2014

I have seen him, I've seen the Devil’s face.
Felt the touch, of his demons cold embrace.
There ain’t nothing, that a simple man could do.
Once the battle is lost, they have won, no matter what you do.
My heart lay broken, in a thousand pieces on the floor.
I know God can’t grant me, the one thing I’d ask him for.
Yet I’m falling, down on my rugged knees,
asking yet again, God won’t you please.
Bring him back, or bring him home,
bring him peace, like he’s never known.
Bring him back, or bring him home,
bring him peace, like he’s never known.
On a cold winter’s morning, oh the air grew too thin
couldn’t fight no more, gotta go, I’m givin’ in.
Baby baby baby, oh how I wish you well,
but I ain’t been the same,since that cold winter’s day.
My heart is broken, it hurts within my soul.
I know God can’t grant me, the one thing I’d ask him for
Bring him back, or bring him home,
bring him peace, like he’s never known.
I am broken, I can’t breathe no more.
it is getting colder,
every minute every hour.
Bring me back, or bring me home..
Please give me peace, like I’ve never known.

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What's your personality type?

Have you taken the MBTI? It's fun, though perhaps not as scientific as some would like to believe.
I call it an advanced form of astrology. It is indeed based on psychological observations, but it is not something used within the psychology practice today.
Fun nonetheless, and very much more accurate than astrology.

I think every time but one when I have taken the test I have turned out to be an "INFJ". And yes, I do relate.

Try it, just for fun.

Take the test here


"The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment is a psychometric questionnaire designed to measure psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions.[1][2][3] These preferences were extrapolated by Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers from the typological theories proposed by Carl Gustav Jung, and first published in his 1921 book Psychological Types (English edition, 1923[4]). Jung theorized that there are four principal psychological functions by which we experience the world: sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking.[5] One of these four functions is dominant most of the time." (from wikipedia)

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Night Owls Unite Against The Oppression!

Research has shown the interesting fact that we are about twice as many distinct night owls than there are distinct morning people. 25% vs 11% to be exact.
This means that 25% of the population hit their most productive time somewhere around and after midnight, while the 11% wake up early morning, ready to catch that slimy worm.
Naturally the rest of the population moves within the gray scale, perhaps leaning more to one or the other without being in the extremes.

Somehow, most likely stemming from the industrial revolution with it's wage work and need for structured day schedules, being productive during the first part of the day became the norm. You could argue that farmers indeed had to start their day early and so on and so forth, but nothing will convince me that they ever looked at a clock the same frantic way we have done since the industries made their entrance into our society.
Anywho, back to my point. Morning people are living the norm. They are also because of this, I'd argue, the greatest tyrants of modern time, thinking that their genetic, inner clock grants them higher morals and a bigger dose of common sense than the rest of us.

Let's turn back time even further, shall we? Beyond industrial revolutions and farming. Let's crawl all the way back to that cave, where fire had just been taken control of. Because I have a question, how would the morning people ever have kept the fire going all through the night, huh? How would they have chosen to protect their people against wolves or whatever predators where lurking in the dark just waiting for a chance to bite the limbs off of sweet tasting, innocent morning people?
See, that's where we come in, the night people. We totally kept that fire going, we kept you warm and cozy and safe from harm.
And this is how you repay us? By sitting up on your high horse at 7 am, offering snide comments about "sleeping all day" or "wasting time" or "whatever do you DO (always emphasis on the DO) in the middle of the night!" (I know, real original, I ain't very impressed by your wits either.)
Tell me something you do at 6:30am that I can’t do at 2am in the year 2014?
Really, I'm challenging you. Saying "work" doesn't count, it scheduled and I don't have a choice there.

With the marvelous invention of the internet there is really nothing I can't do. I can even order stamps online and have them delivered. I just gotta make sure to make it to the postal office before 10pm, which I think.. I THINK I actually can manage.
You are like religious fanatics, firmly believing your path is the true path. I bet Bin-Laden was a morning person.

That night owls would be lazy is just complete and utter rubbish.
I bet you wouldn’t be so frickin happy-go-lucky if we decided to start dragging you out of bed at 1 am to write a scientific report, or work in customer service. You would rather swiftly turn just as grumpy as we are.

Because that’s what you do. You drag us out of bed in the middle of our night and you expect us to be productive during the time that YOU are most productive. Let me do the same job at midnight and I swear, I will show you what being productive is all about!
You went so far as to dub yourselves “A-people” and then grant us the lesser name of “B-people.” As if we are some second class citizens. F*ck, we totally should have let the wolves have your ungrateful ass.

I say night-owls unite! It is time to bring a new world order. We need to fight the oppression!
Let the morning people be miserable for a few thousand years, it is their turn to suffer!

I hope I one day get to sit on a stone and watch a metaphorical wolf attack and then smile smugly and say:
"Well, if you didn't sleep ALL NIGHT, you would have seen it coming, you would have been prepared. Quite irresponsible of you I must say. Oh, and by the way - the fire's out."

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Creativity Demands Creativity

Are you a creative person?

Congratulations, and to quote one of my favorite TV-characters;
- Welcome to a life of insecurity and paralyzing self-doubt!

Creativity - the need to create. Whether it is composing, writing, painting, photography or making pine cone animals or ships in bottles I would claim it's far beyond a hobby.
If you suffer this condition, you need it.
It is my firm belief that creativity that's not allowed to roam freely, that is kept locked up inside will inevitably wither but never die. It will just lay there and fester.


It's like those nightmares where you scream from the top of your lungs in horror, but not a sound will come out.

For many years I searched for my creative "out".. I feel like I've tried it all.
I've played several instruments, I sang, I snapped pictures, I painted, though my paintings were reminiscent of those painted by zoo-animals.
Nothing caught my real interest though. I quickly got to a point were it just wasn't fun. I didn't care to learn bar chords, or advanced piano sheet music, nor painting perspectives or the technicalities of photography. Nothing ever worked out as I wanted it to anyway. My hands were always left incapable of performing what my mind so desperately wanted them to.

You feel inadequate, without that out. You're screaming, without a sound.

And then I found it. It was there all along I just somehow forgot.
Writing.
I used to love to write. I wrote stories any chance I got as a kid. I, as many others, gave deep poetry a shot as a teenager as a way of dealing with all that teenage-angst, but then I somehow forgot it.
The written word has always been my favorite way of expressing myself. When I first met my husband, I didn't always tell him how I felt, and I've certainly never been, though I wish I was much of a "show-er".
As cheesy as it sounds, I wrote him, and you know what the best part of that is? The written word remains. 9 years down the line, those letters are still here and I hope when I am being particularly hard to love, he brings them out to remind himself that sometimes, I can be nice too.
Anyway, a little off topic there..

I've come to realize that creativity does not only demand creativity, it also demands confidence.

Do you remember when you were little, and you'd painted something which you proudly showed you parents, who went; "Oh wow, that's wonderful... What is it?"
You didn't take offense, you just went ahead and explained that obviously it was a robot-moose family that lived in the spaceship in the background.. or something. And so you parents went;
"Oh, well of course it's robot-moose.. I see that now!" and then they hung your surrealistic piece of art on the fridge.

What happens to that confidence? Who or what is it that is robbing us of it?

Take my sister for example. I am not by any means saying she's painting robot-moose or the like. I find her paintings striking and absolutely great. I have no idea how they would hold up in the "art-world" but she made them, hung them in her living room and thus is saying; "I made these, they turned out great and I have pride in my work." And I can't help but wonder, who will question it?
That kind of confidence will get you far. "I made it, I'm proud of it and I don't give a shit what some unemployed art-major might have to say about my work in comparison with Picasso's!"
I may not have majored in art, but trust me, she wins!

Dare do it! Or the demons who keep your creativity locked up will eat you alive.
"Creative people are more prone to depression."
Yes, I am willing to believe that. It's like being left completely unable to move or communicate yet having your senses and consciousness intact. The claustrophobia - I can't even think about it.

No, you might not be Picasso, Hemingway or Antonio Vivaldi but who cares? Do it!

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