Creative Anxiety

I don't know what's worse, finding a major cause of your anxiety or realizing that's your anxiety is most likely going to get worse the more you create. Let me explain.

Being a creative person is like living in your own world. People most times don't understand where your head is (because most times it's up in the clouds) and if you talk about your ideas, people think you're crazy or not normal or 'interesting'. Some people are even fascinated by your mind and even want to be in a relationship with you, but as flattering as that sounds, those people really don't  understand you, they are just infatuated by your creativity. So basically they are just fans, which is nice but isn't satisfying.

Creatives especially writers tend to be introverts so needing people to be around us is not really of great importance to us. But those same humans that we prefer to be away from, are the same humans who have to read our work. This is it's own headache.

Personally, I always ran from my creative side. She's crazy! And wild and disorganized. I spent most of my youth studying science so to me being a creative person was in complete contrast to that. So I tried hard not to embrace it. But when destiny chases, you can run but you can't hide.... Well not for long at least.

After embracing my creativity and letting it flow freely as nature intended it to, I realized that my anxiety was getting worse as my content got better. I begin to have seemingly random anxiety attacks. I was completely unaware of what was taking place. And my family and friends didn't understand what was happening either.

But I did some research, talked to the right people and I discovered that a major source of my increased anxiety was my creative work. My creativity was fueling my anxiety. The more I thought about if   my writing was any good and worry about every concept I was developing, the more self doubt stepped in. I was always someone who pushed myself for perfection but art is so much more subjective than science and I wasn't dealing well with the pressure of 'will people understand and like my work'.

So how do you get rid of the anxiety and the depression? I'm not sure if I ever will but I'm trying to find help and I'm trying to learn not to be so hard on myself. I'm trying to be happy with the decisions I've made and learn from my mistakes instead of focusing on them. That's all we creatives can do.