This post is part of a series on creativity and addiction.
Are you a nonfiction writer? Come join me for three months of nonfiction book coaching. Learn more here.
I CAN’T GET NO SATISFACTION
One of the major unfortunate consequences of the extra drive that we discussed in our last post—the extra ambition, egotism, energy, passion, and appetite with which nature imbues creative individuals—is that we are hard-pressed—and often completely unable—to feel satisfied.
A pressured creator eats a hundred peanuts—not satisfying enough. He writes a good book—not satisfying enough. He has a shot of Scotch—not satisfying enough. He wins the Nobel Prize—not satisfying enough. This inability to get satisfied produces a background unhappiness and tension in the creative person’s life and makes him want some experience that will mask this feeling or make it go away.
So, he has another hundred peanuts, so as to provide himself with some relief; without, however, coming any closer to actually satisfying himself. It is as if nature turbocharged some of its creatures and then failed to give them a decent braking system. It provided extra energy and with it a susceptibility to mania. It provided extra ambition and with it a susceptibility to grandiosity. It provided extra appetite and with it a susceptibility to promiscuity, obesity, stubborn anorexia, alcoholism. It provided extra adrenaline and with it a susceptibility to car wrecks. If all of these “extras” could be channeled and regulated, we might thank nature for its largesse. As it is, these extras can make the creative person’s life wild and unruly.
So, nature creates an individual who must know for himself, follow his own path, and be himself, puts it in his mind that he is born to do special work, gives him the energy to pursue this work and the courage to stand in opposition to those who would prevent him from walking his idiosyncratic path, and then turns around and tortures him by doing nothing to relieve his core anxiety. Instead, it heightens that anxiety by giving him an existential outlook or spiritual thirst, making sure that nothing will ever satisfy him, pouring adrenaline through his system, and swelling his head just enough that he tips over, top-heavy, into self-centeredness. All of this makes the work of creating that much harder and life a series of frustrating struggles.
To repeat, not every creative person resembles this picture: but many do. For people who are creative and who were harmed, deflected, or thwarted in such a way that their individuality and creativity are prevented from manifesting themselves, the risk for addiction is even higher. These many thwarted creative individuals, tens of millions of them, know exactly how soulful, satisfying, and special it would be to write an excellent novel or compose a great symphony. But they are prevented from doing creative work and standing up for their individuality by the harm done to them.
These are the world’s world-be artists; or, as the psychoanalyst Otto Rank famously dubbed them, the world’s artist-manqués. Their risk for addiction is heightened because of this core frustration, that they have been prevented from manifesting their potential. The working writer drinks because he is driven, the would-be writer drinks to drown his frustrations—and the typical creative person, who is sometimes effective and sometimes blocked, finds himself confronted by both reasons to drink.
It turns out that most creative people are a mixture of these two types, active, effective, driven, and creative in one area of their life or during one time period and passive, ineffective, unmotivated and thwarted in another area of their life or during another time period. A poet may have a fertile two years and then a stagnant five years. A researcher may delve deeply into a subject that interests her and then find no similarly engrossing subject for the next decade. The reality is that most creative people will experience both sets of challenges: the challenges that come as they try to manifest their individuality and the challenges that come from failing to express their individuality—and the extra risk for addiction that each set of challenges bring.
Individuality adds to your risk for addiction—and so does suppressed individuality. The drive to manifest your potential adds to your risk for addiction—and so does tamping that drive down. Growing oppositional adds to your risk for addiction—and remaining too obedient and doing violence to your nature also adds to your risk for addiction. I bet that this makes perfect sense to you and that it matches your felt sense of reality and the complexities that you know exist. Who wouldn’t break free of an addiction if addiction were a simpler matter than this? But it is exactly this knotty.
The greater the extent to which individuality (and thwarted individuality) has flowed through your family—the more novelists, frustrated musicians, inventors, frustrated explorers, iconoclasts, and so on, that you can number in your family history—the more likely it is that you carry the “individuality marker” and the more at risk for addiction that makes you. Naturally this is an impressionistic and intuitive matter, trying to decide whether a given family member looks to be more individual or more conventional. Yet we draw those conclusions all the time, recognizing in Aunt Rose some spark or quality that we simply don’t see in Uncle Max.
If you give it some thought, you will no doubt be able to do this intuiting and decide for yourself to what extent you come more from a family of individuals (or frustrated individuals) or more from a family of conventional folks; and to what extent, if the former looks to be the case, that adds to your risk for addiction.
More next time.