This post is part of a series on creativity and addiction.
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A person with vitality, passion, and energy–a person who is really alive–possesses roiling thoughts, big ideas, and insistent desires. These inevitably lead to obsessions and compulsions. When these obsessions and compulsions are channeled in a positive direction, so that, for example, a writer is only obsessed about the novel on her mind and her only compulsion is to get that novel down on paper, all is well. Then she is creative, engaged, productive, and alive.
But because a creator can only create for so many hours each day and because creating is anxiety-producing work that she may be inclined to avoid altogether, she is often left with undirected kilowatts of energy to redirect as well as the anxiety of not creating that she needs to relieve. Her large energy needing to be expended and her anxiety needing to be eased barrel her headlong toward some other outlet—and the possibility of addiction.
It is excellent if you obsess about your novel. It is wonderful if you feel compelled to write late into the night. Your productive obsessions and compulsions are nothing but the expression of your passionate meaning-making efforts. You should want to feel compelled to write your novel, because, if you do not feel compelled, that is the equivalent of taking insufficient interest in it. You don’t want to obsess about your neighbor’s untidy lawn but you certainly do want to obsess about your own creative ideas.
The poet and novelist May Sarton wrote in At 70, the journal of her seventieth year: “Perhaps the answer is not detachment, as I used to believe, but rather to be deeply involved in something, to be attached. I am attached in a thousand ways. The price of being attached ‘in a thousand ways’ is that there is never even twenty-four hours free of pressure, but this year I am clear in my mind that just this is what my life is all about, and what I have to learn (so late!) is to accept the multiple demands and understand that a rich life is bought at a high price in energy. If I can be wiser about not feeling so compulsive about everything, all will be well.”
A person with this life energy at her disposal must cultivate the habit of productively obsessing, so that she works hard at her creative efforts. At the same time, she must prevent herself from sending her energy and her thoughts off in directions that harm her, toward slot machines, Internet sex chats, or the next bottle of vodka. And she must temporarily turn off even her productive obsessions, so that, for example, she remembers that she has a child to pick up from school.
When something manages to reduce our core anxiety and provides us with a feeling of well-being, however fleetingly, we want to repeat that feeling. After a while, we can get hooked on that feeling and that anxiety relief. That something might be chocolate, a wager, an orgasm, a fix, a beer, or a comforting belief. We think about Heaven, reduce or mask our experience of anxiety, and produce pleasure—or at least a respite from worry. We sip our cognac, reduce or mask our experience of anxiety, and feel better. We drive at a hundred miles an hour and, high on adrenaline and thrilled by the ride, produce pleasure and distance ourselves from our worries. Naturally we want that feeling again and again. Who wouldn’t?
People want to reduce their experience of anxiety. The body is set up to help in this regard, turning potato chips into chemical pleasure and relaxation, turning an orgasm into chemical pleasure and relaxation, using an hour of computer solitaire to take its mind off its core anxieties, using the raucous hubbub of a bar to distract it from its worries, embracing the adrenalin rush of a big bet, a huge merger, or a fast drive down the highway. Everybody knows these anxiety-reducing pleasures; some bodies become addicted to them. If you have big drives, big appetites, big challenges, and big anxieties, this dynamic is magnified many-fold.
This is all by way of saying that the obsessive nature of the creative person is not a bad thing, in and of itself, as it allows her to productively obsess about her work. But when that powerful obsessive nature gets a grip on an obsession with drinking or with using drugs as its favorite way to alleviate anxiety, that grip is often an iron one. Obsess all you want: but productively! You don’t want to tranquilize yourself out of your productive obsessions; but you do want to avoid the destructive obsessing, arising from anxiety and your difficulties with making and maintaining meaning, that can lead you directly to physical and psychological dependence on drugs, alcohol, food, and the other meaning crutches that are ready and waiting.