CREATIVITY, MEANING, AND ADDICTION
This post is part of a series on creativity and addiction.
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In previous posts in this creativity and addiction series, I’ve described your creative nature as a certain drive or inner pressure to be an individual and to realize your human potential, a drive that as likely as not puts you in opposition to conventional aspects of your family, community, and society at large. Both your inner drive and your tense relationship to your culture and society increase your risk for addiction.
In this post, I want to continue our chat about the added risk of individuality and look at another face of that risk: its existential face. One of the main aspects of being a creative person—and of striving for individuality—is that you feel responsible for making meaning in your life. This honorable stance leads to regular meaning crises, since the activity you had invested primary meaning in—your painting career, say—will on some days be rendered less meaningful, or even meaningless, because, for example, you hate your current painting or your sales have slipped significantly. Creators are prone to addictions because an addiction is an ineffective but tempting way to handle these recurrent meaning crises.
Why is your relationship to meaning such a risk factor? Say that you find little meaning in your day job. Your novel also isn’t going well, which is a second meaning drain. The hard work of creating is wearing you out, as is the hard work of filling up your seconds, minutes, and hours with meaning. You feel at odds with your culture and at odds with your world. A drink seems to help. Many drinks seem to help more. Drinking becomes an obsession, showing up at the neighborhood bar becomes a compulsion. Especially if you are burdened by additional risk factors like a biological propensity for addiction and early developmental traumas, you are staring an addiction straight in the face.
You begin to organize your life around your drinking, even though the drinking and its aftermath do not help your writing one bit, all romantic mythology about wild and crazy drunk authors notwithstanding. Indeed, you stop thinking about writing and you start thinking only about drinking. The ongoing meaning crisis and the void do not go away, but thinking about your next drink fills that void. The messes that you make, the self-recriminations, the scenes, the bargains you strike with yourself, all the dramas and tidying up fill the void—only pathetically, to be sure, but no less successfully for that.
Now your friends talk more about getting you sober than about reading your new novel. You realize that you are on a downward slide and there is something a little heroic in your struggle to break the addiction—the heroism you might have lavished on your novel you lavish on fighting your addiction. The addiction takes the place of your creative efforts and becomes the thing that you think about, the thing that you crave, and the thing that you have dreams and nightmares about. It becomes your meaning—or rather, your meaning substitute. Does this sound familiar?
Without genuinely meaningful activities to pursue, your aliveness eventually turns to listlessness; you begin to grow out of sorts and become ripe for distraction and addiction. Similarly, when you abandon your meaning-making efforts for whatever reason—because you find it too hard to make meaning, because you don’t know what meaning to make, or because you’ve made some meaning and now want a respite from meaning-making–you court an addiction. Agitated, bored, you throw up your hands and cry, “Give me sex, give me a high, give me something—anything!”
Colin Wilson, chronicling the poet Lord Byron’s many love affairs with married women and young boys during the winter of 1818, explained: “Byron’s chief problem was a simple one: he had no idea what to do with himself. He knew that he found social life boring and dissatisfying, but what was the alternative? Poetry might occupy a few hours of each day, but he spent the rest of his time wondering what he could do to keep himself amused. Life became an endless flight from boredom, rolling in his carriage all over Europe.”
An addiction, although it reduces your freedom to make personal meaning and increases your psychological and physical dependence on the thing craved, nevertheless begins to take care of meaning crises in its own way, producing an oddly satisfactory state of affairs: the happy bondage I described earlier. The irony about addiction is that, despite its terrible consequences, despite the guilt and despair that come from being out of control and from knowing that you are out of control, the addiction still seems less of a problem than do freedom and the challenges of making meaning.
The bondage is a real bondage but an almost happy bondage, for while addicted there is no question about how to fill up your time. You drink and keep drinking, you sleep it off, you get sick, you go to the emergency room, you make scenes, you lose friends, you break bones. This, it turns out, is easier than sitting in the blinding sunlight and answering the question, “What healthy thing can I do with my freedom? In what meaningful project should I next invest my energy and my capital?”
The bound creator becomes devoted to his addiction and loses his ability to live authentically. He may become bound to anything: stock trading, Star Trek conventions, writing in a particular genre or style. He may become bound to consuming peanuts by the pound, like Orson Welles, who ironically claimed to hate peanuts. She may become bound to planting flowers, like May Sarton, who likened her gardening to an addiction. When you want to train your mind over here, where the real meaning is to be made, but your mind goes over there, to the happy place of peanuts, flowers, gin, or poker chips, you’ve become an addict.
More to come!