The Creative Spirit

What do you do when you are sad? There are so many ways to process and deal with emotion; I'm sure you've got your own specific method. Does it work for you? Why? You're probably sensing that this post is going to be a bummer. I hope that it won't. Bear with me.

I was up past 2am last night, my second night of insomnia. If you can't fall asleep after 20 minutes, you're supposed to haul your bones out of bed, go to another area of your home, and participate in some non-screen activity, like reading a book (a papery book, not an e-book, natch), or listening to quiet music. I know this. I know this from years of restless sleep, trouble falling asleep, nightmares. Sleep paralysis. I even had my very first (that I can remember) night terror last summer! I am a certified expert at bad sleep. But did I get up after 20 minutes and follow documented, scientific advice from Sleep Professionals? No. I repeatedly checked my phone, talked to myself, gave an interview on Ellen about a funny candid video her producers dug up of me (I'm not kidding). Practiced my SAG acceptance speech. The usual.

Finally, sometime after midnight, I got up and came here, to my workspace in my living area. I opened up Jane Fonda (my laptop) and pondered how I would utilize the lovely blue light of my screen in the middle of the damn night.

My options were limited by the fact that my phone was charging in the other room and I needed it for some of the client work I could do, and the fact that it was Sunday and I had already met my minimum quota of words that I require of myself during my weekly novel writing sessions. So I added a testimonials page to this site, compiling amazing feedback I recently received from three of my clients. I made a little graphic for some of it. I sat in the dark, eyes burning, and worked on my business.

Eventually, I wandered back to bed and slowly fell into a bizarre, four-hour sleep that concluded with me dreaming that I was getting a massive rose tattoo on my inner right arm from a beginner who was doing a terrible job. Man, was I glad to wake up from that one. That thing was ugly.

My sadness and I are old friends. I had a middle-of-the-road childhood, in which I experienced trauma and death at a relatively young age, but compared to a lot of atrocities experienced by children around the world, I was doing alright. These early childhood experiences, combined with what I now strongly believe to be undiagnosed ADHD, made me feel very separate from my peers. I remember wanting to fit in with them and not being sure why I couldn't quite connect, or relate, or make them relate. Wanting to be "normal" and not really understanding what that meant or how to get there. In my own defence, PTSD and anxiety on top of ADHD made regulating my emotions difficult. It was a miracle I had friends at all, given how my mental state manifested itself a lot of time, and how (understandably) ill-equipped school-age children are to deal with someone going through adult trauma at the age of 10.

Over the years, I've done the work. I've "sat with my shit", as Theo Fleury would say. I've adapted to the way I process information, and what I require to feel stable and safe. When I was growing up, there was "no excuse" for subpar grades or lack of participation in school activities, so I got good grades and played sports, joined Yearbook and Grad Committee and Leadership, sang in the choir(s), did the school plays. I even co-managed the rugby team one year, because girls weren't allowed to play but my friends were on the team. In high school, I made the Principal's List and I won excellence awards and I was also emotional, isolated, self-loathing, and insecure - like the rest of my peers.

My friend Sadness and I have come to terms a bit in recent years. I don't need her around to be creative, but she definitely knows how to linger in the background of my life, waiting for a moment to spark and new song to begin to write itself in my mind. As I have built consistency in my writing routine, I have developed an ironic sense of happiness from the creative output created by my sadness.

Recently, following an unforgivable ghosting by a man who knew better, far too long into seeing one another for there to be any excuse other than death (he's still alive, trust me), I started my new novel. It opens with the line, "The trash took itself out", and it doesn't take a genius to understand why.

You see where I'm going with this. I'm good at sad.

Almost everyone has That Person. The What-If Person. The 'La Douleur Exquise' Person. The Why-Didn't-It-Ever-Happen Person. My Person, my That Person, has been with me awhile, now. We met in our early twenties and I loved him the way insecure women who have never dated because they were taller than most of the guys they went to school with for most of the time they went to school do: in fear and denial. Looking back at how desperate I was to keep that secret - so desperate, in fact, that I denied being in love with him two years into knowing him and realized I was keeping the secret from myself - I feel compassion and sympathy for my former self. Nowadays, everyone and their dog knows I love him. It's not the same kind of love, obviously. It's not an active, verb-y type love. It's just a truth of my life, one that makes my love for him impossible to categorize; it is romantic, platonic, familial. All at once. It is all of the kinds of love and therefore, in a way, none of them. It is, however, unconditional and permanent.

My That Person went through a tragedy on Saturday morning. Probably one of the worst tragedies he could go through; as if it was tailored just to be the most miserable experience it could be for him. I learned about it soon after and spent the day pacing. Grieving for myself, as this event was also hard on me. Thinking that my Person must be heartbroken. Hearing from his family that he most assuredly was. Not wanting to intrude. Not wanting to ignore. We have communicated sporadically over the past handful of months, but this was not a meme that reminded me of him. This was His Worst Nightmare.

I stewed all day Saturday and could not get my sadness to cooperate with me - so I left it. I watched a marathon of episodes of a sitcom. I had a shower. I planned some client work for a time when I would be able to focus on it. I sat with my shit and tried to work out if I needed to contact him. When I was still wide awake approaching 10pm (I usually try to be drifting by then, because if I can't have quality sleep I'm going to damn sure try for quantity), I sent him a text. I said that I was sorry, that I was here if he needed me, offered some memories I might have on my phone if he wanted them, and told him not to worry about it now, just to try to rest and nourish himself.

Then I couldn't sleep for hours.

I heard back from him Sunday morning and his bleak, shocked heartbreak resonated through his text messages. That's the trick and the trouble when you know someone so well; the way that person types a text message, the phrasing that person uses, tells you everything you need to know. Reading his words strangled my heart. Trying to say something helpful. Offering a phone call if he needed someone to cry to or rant at or just sit quietly with. Being practical and offering financial assistance or to have food delivered, because I know he won't be thinking about eating. My own grief about the event evaporated and I subsumed his, instead. His was unbearable for me; a laughing leviathan at the pebble of my claim to the loss.

The weight of his pain hung around all day. I completed two client projects early. The weight transitioned with me into the night time, and then there I was at 2am, working on my website.

Here I am today, after four hours of sleep, deciding my website should have a blog. Go figure, a writer writing a blog. Could it be bad for business? Yeah. People might think that this is my go-to style and not have faith that I can adapt my formatting and verbiage to their needs. Ah well. What is meant for me will find me.

The creative spirit is a funny thing. It seeks outlets at all times, in all ways. It gives my pain a purpose. It is stories waiting to be told, to others who might need to know that someone else knows their pain, feels their loss, sucks at sleep, works when she's grieving. Works when she's hurting for someone else. Storytelling is a part of who I am; it is why I am a writer, actor, director, songwriter. It is why my business is the business of clarifying messages, ghostwriting and copywriting for my clients in order to help them to tell their stories.

We are all processing, in our own way and in our own time, the lives we lead, our goals, our dreams, our purpose. It is an honour to be able to facilitate that for others.

#Writer #GhostWriter #CopyWriter #Storyteller #Author #Songwriter #Actor #Clients #Grief #Loss #Friendship #SoulMates