Finding Happiness and Creativity Within: A Personal Journey
Some of my friends spend their lives unhappy, working on their books, lamenting that they are not selling more books, trashing their industry for the way it works, and all the time, they keep plowing discontentedly in their field of choice, never satisfied, never at ease, never content. If their work does not suffer for it, certainly their life does.
Happiness will not come when one sells a million books, gets a million dollars, or a million people have seen a movie made from one of their books. There will always, even with this, be a desire for more. My friends think that if only these things would come about, then happiness would come. Of course, stress comes when there is not enough to pay the bills. I get that. But once those basic needs are met, unhappiness takes on a different flavor, a different variety, a malignant feeling.
I’ve lived that life, that desire, or we might call it some sort of carnivorous insatiability, of wanting more, more, more. When we look at the outside world, not in terms of setting goals but in seeking happiness, we will always be sorely disappointed and unfulfilled because the monster, as I have tried to tell my friends, is not living out there in the industry, it is living and eating away at our respective hearts.
It's taken me a lifetime to get over this. It has interfered with my creativity. It has not interfered with my output, but it has been detrimental to my ability to appreciate what I have been able to accomplish. To some degree, I also think in the back of my mind, there has been this little gremlin lurking and biting off pieces of my creative brain, whispering into my ear, “Is this commercial enough? Will you sell enough? Will the reviews be good enough?” The focus then turns from the interior of self-actualization to an exterior of second-guessing and some sort of performance-based self-worth. It is a house divided. Creativity suffers.
Over the years, I have to say happily that I have found peace. The demons came from probably many places: growing up a bit on the poor side, childhood family dynamics, quirks of my brain that I was born with, a gnawing need always for more that came from somewhere, all sorts of unknown places that a psychologist would probably have a heyday in discovering and piecing together. At present, though, it doesn’t matter so much as that I am at a place where these things no longer exist. I write what I want. I concentrate fully in the zone of what I am creating. My writing, while good by many standards throughout my life, is now much better because, to be trite, my whole heart is in it.
I wish this personal arc for my friends, and if you’re looking to the exterior for happiness, I wish it for you. Happiness can be found nowhere but inside. Take a moment, be silent, and look at how much you have accomplished and how fortunate you are to work at a job you love, like writing, and let the other take care of itself. We cannot control the wind, we cannot control what happens outside of us, but we do have control of what happens within us. In that freeing realization, we become one with ourselves, no longer a house divided but a unified front, expressing who we truly are.
This is creativity allowed to be free.
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