How to turn the "pain you can't get rid of" into creativity

I believe that our creativity grows like sidewalk weeds out of the cracks between our pathologies—not from the pathologies themselves. But so many people think it’s the other way around. For this reason, you will often meet artists who deliberately cling to their suffering, their addictions, their fears, their demons. They worry that if they ever l

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All creative work is at bottom a means of self-liberation and a coping mechanism — for the loneliness, the despair, the chaos and contradiction within. It is the best means we have of transmuting that which gnaws at us into something that nourishes, and yet how little of that private ferment is visible in the finished work

Being a creative means embracing the urge to put more of yourself—your identity, personality, and unique way of seeing—into the world, whether it be the way you make your breakfast in the morning or your trick for getting through your morning commute, or the themes that keep coming up among the thousands of photos in your camera roll. When we confo... See more