Anxiety and Creativity

I’ve spent much of my life anxious.

I’ve spent much of my life not knowing I was anxious.

I thought I was scared, or stressed, or tired, but seldom named my disquiet ‘anxiety’.

Though the linear psychology of cause-and-effect is often unconvincing, I can trace elements of my anxiety to intergenerational factors. My parents both came from difficult, violent and impoverished backgrounds, and achieved fragile stability in the unforgiving suburbs of the English middle class. My father was a teacher at a third-rate boarding school. My mother was the nurse in the same school, until they married. After that she was a nurse elsewhere and house mistress of a boarding house.

It wasn’t Harry Potter.

They taught me from early in life, to keep my head down, to avoid drawing attention to myself.

They lived in terror of being deemed class-imposters, and so being sent back to where they came from.

One of their achievements was to send me to the third-rate boarding school where they had met, and to which my father dedicated his entire working life.

It was a shithole.

I was bright, noisy, arty - holder of both music and academic scholarships to the school - which did not much endear me to anyone.

The school venerated rugby and mindless, muscular-christian, unreflective, mental conformity.

Things did not go well for me there.

My parents did not want me to ‘stand out’ by going home each night, so I boarded. Every moment of every day, for months on end, like most other children there, I learned a hyper-vigilant surveying of the landscape for hidden threat.

When those threats stopped being hidden, and emerged into the plain light of day - when the bullying started - I was utterly alone. My father was ashamed I was failing to fit in. My mother did not have the words to comfort me, nor could acknowledge any comforting was needed. The school thought that someone who was being bullied should learn to stand up for themselves - and anyway, preferred to side with the strong rather than the weak, because it was easier to keep order with the noisiest and most violent onside.

I developed an anxiety which stayed with me long after the happy day I walked away from school for good. While, consciously, I disconnected from everything school had tried to indoctrinate me with, I failed to disconnect from what it had actually taught me - that I was never safe.

Art and creative process was my lifeline through those years. A friendly music teacher - himself an outsider - let me slip into the music room when I should have been ‘doing sport’. There I listened to scratchy records of classical performances from mysterious countries in Europe’s East. My imagination sparked. There I learned to play wild improvised sounds on the piano, with no one to listen and sneer.

In school plays I found temporary communities where, for the length of a rehearsal at least, I could belong. I started the lifelong journey of exploring ‘the extended self’ that emerges through interconnection.

In creativity interconnection is both inward and outward. Whether consuming someone else’s art or making my own, new doorways of imagination and possibility open inside of me. I see other versions of who I might be. In creating, I reach out and connect - with others in a process, with audiences, with the world.

Through that process of interconnection - both changing and being changed by the world around - hyper-vigilance is replaced, at least for a while, by calm and focused attention.

This is still the heart of my daily practice and my coaching work. Through creative process, I create spaces of connection, inward and outward - where anxious mulling on ‘what if’ is replaced by calm focus on ‘what is.’

In the end this is not a surprise. Creativity is empowerment. When we create, we make a world from nothing. Creative process is both an end in itself and a rehearsal for the complex business of living.

Anxiety is disempowerment. We fear that the world will be taken away from us.

When we choose to live creatively, we choose to live at the centre of a vibrant web of interconnectedness. In making art, we make the world.

#anxiety #creativity #art #boardingschool #personaldevelopment