#43 Work, Creativity, Survival
To create is to survive
THE THING IS
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
ELLEN BASS
“You should write the book!” my well-meaning friend and former flatmate tells me at my birthday party. It is mid-December, a bit cold outside but not downright frosty, an anomaly in Amsterdam this late in the year. “Creativity is hard to focus on when you need to survive,” I tell her, referring vaguely to the dumpster fire that 2023 felt like. At the time, I had spent nearly all year looking for work, working intently, or barely working and wishing I was working, or feeling guilty for not working more.
Of course, bless her heart, she gives me a knowing look. She understands. Undertaking work/a professional route/jobs in the creative industry is not a game for the faint of heart. And yet it’s usually the fainthearted, the sensitive, the ones with really swelled-up souls and barely contained, emotional insides who pursue this type of work. It is personal and disparaging and hardening and softening and disemboweling to put yourself out there and give your creative work, your creative ideas, in the hopes that somebody will invest in them. In the hope that someone will think, yes. This is someone whose ideas I like. Let me give them the most beautiful thing I have, the thing I care most about, and let them shape it in a way that the world will recognize its beauty and immensity.
Yes, I’m talking about creative work that ranges from product photography to advertising to copywriting and beyond. All of it is storytelling, all of it is subjective, and all of it is up for the judgment and consideration of others. It is personal work. There is no way around it - it is impossible to follow through a creative vision without having a visionary come to play with you. The world will receive this work and it will be appraised, applauded, or it might be criticized, even derided. It all depends. Always.
Creativity also requires one very tricky thing: solitude, which can sometimes feel a lot like loneliness. And loneliness has this sticky quality to it, in which the more you try to escape it through work, finding that work, networking, or posting on LinkedIn, the more it follows you around. Who are you, really? Why are you here? Who are you sharing this for? A small, sticky spider in the back of my neck says. I say that it’s making me feel small, the questions around whether something I have made is good enough, whether I am qualified enough, whether there really is something special about the way I work, what I do.
I’ve been reflecting on the past two years a lot lately. 2022 and 2023 blend into each other for me in a very distinct way — I suppose this is what it’s like when you view years in eras and progressions rather than self-contained periods. Unknowingly, I’ve been doing this since I can remember. I like to joke time isn’t real - but it isn’t, not in the way I experience it - I confuse 2019 with 2021 regularly, mix up 2015 with 2017 in the same way. They all belong to different periods - university, my first office jobs, my first full-time job, and now, working on my own. Solitude and creativity, hand in hand.
Creativity is a means of survival. But creativity is also hard to get a grasp of when you’re trying to survive. In the world, bombs keep going off; my grandmother is very ill; my cousin is no longer here; a friend faces illness, again; my younger sister enters her 20s and feels the loneliest she has ever felt; I can see all of them while I walk down the Vondelpark at 11 am on a Wednesday, counting the branches on the naked trees. Lining the sky as if to reach up with bony brown fingers on a very Amsterdam, very Dutch grey sky. Creativity is everything I have. It is in the quality of the work I do and in the journals I wrote in as a precocious 12-year-old. It is in the endless book analyses I wrote in English Literature class. Tying stories together through chapters, finding clever solutions to seemingly unrelated problems, understanding the relationships between the plot, the characters, the tensions, the resolution.
I remind myself that part of life is also holding all of these distinct experiences together in the palms of my hands; I tell Alicia over a call that they feel heavy; the spider is glued to the back of my neck. I tell her it feels small and worried, an isolating feeling. I tell her I don’t understand what direction is best. I tell her I want someone to tell me where to go.
Creativity is a means of survival. Creativity is where survival lies. I make promises to return to writing, make promises to make something new, make promises to find that direction, that clarity, make promises to try again.
And that is the thing about creative work — it isn’t more precious or more different or more important than any other work. Far from it; I believe it’s deeply self-involved, if only to try and find something there that’s worth giving to the world.
It is windy outside, I haven’t worn my hair down in days. The branches overlooking the water blend into the dark greyish green. And yet, the water keeps sparkling, somehow, glistening.
I cannot fix the world, but I can give the world my gift.
