The Creative Mind

Here's how it happens:

The creative mind is full of ideas.  It is constantly thinking, constantly analyzing, constantly trying to reconstruct the world around it into a legible set of rules and models.  It is primarily concerned with the constructing the future, and how to correlate the information it receives into a strategy for bringing about the best possible future, for itself and others.  In its normal state, the creative mind is in a continuous state of buzzing, calculating, identifying, categorizing, predicting, prescribing.

The creative mind always has something to say to its host body.  It is always nagging, always trying to improve, always looking for a better solution or a more efficient way to achieve its goals, whatever they may be.

Sometimes, the host body slips, and fails to perform to its mind's expectations.  This can happen for any number of reasons.  The mind might misinterpret some data, causing a mistake in the mental model.  Sometimes the body is tired, and cannot carry out the tasks set out in front of it, or the body's short-term desires interfere with the mind's long-term goals.  Sometimes, external forces don't allow for the mind or body to express itself, and creativity is forced into remission.

Occasionally, something more tragic occurs.

One or two mess-ups is hardly noticeable, the creative mind keeps chugging along.  Nobody is perfect, and if one can accomplish most of one's goals, then things are proceeding rather well.  Maybe one makes a few more mistakes -- maybe the slip-ups become noticeable, but still, the good that one does far outweighs the oversights and the things one forgets to do.  After a series of noticeable mistakes, perhaps the mind starts to become concerned.  Maybe it has correlated some information wrong, producing a bug in the mental model that needs to be corrected.  Perhaps the body has succumbed to a dysfunction in its execution, like addiction or disease, that is preventing the body from fulfilling its duties.  Or there might be some outside force preventing the body and mind from doing anything, regardless of will or power.  Still, these are only obstacles, and obstacles can be addressed with proper identification and the resources to overcome them.  

Sometimes, however, several of these failures happen at once, or happen over a long period of time.  This can trigger a sort of crisis, one which is particularly distressing for a creative mind.  When you repeatedly fail to to accomplish any of your goals, your mind is thrown into a state of chaos.  What if the mental model you have constructed is massively flawed in some very important way, and you can no longer see a clear path towards success and happiness?  What if your body is fundamentally incapable of doing the things your mind wants it to do, no matter how clear your path is or how much you will it to perform?  What if the external forces preventing you from asserting yourself are so insurmountable as to be hopeless to overcome?

Drastic change is needed.

If time passes and nothing changes, the creative mind falls into a state of despair.  It is in this state that the creative mind turns on itself, transforming itself from an asset into a deadly adversary.  For the creative mind has infinite ways to torment itself, to convince itself that what it is currently experiencing is insurmountable, inoperable, or worse, inevitable.  Something is clearly wrong, very wrong, and despite repeated attempts to correct itself, the mind has only driven itself deeper and deeper into despair.

At this crucial point, the creative mind stops thinking of ways to make things better.  It has learned to be helpless.  Despite its best efforts, nothing has improved, and no change is possible.  The tragedy, however, is this;  the creative mind doesn't stop working.  Oh no.  The creative mind starts devoting itself to the cause -- it begins to perpetuate hopelessness, it begins to tackle the infinite mystery of how you ended up like this in the first place.  It works day and night to escape into the past, to remind yourself what things were like when you 'had it', or what things could have been like if circumstances had been different.  Most of all, it seeks to provide infinite justifications for why the way you are now was inevitable.  You *never* could have made it -- your body was too weak.  Your mind *never* had a plan to happiness and success -- after all, it led you to where you are today.

At this point, the depression and anxiety have conspired to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  You are too tired and too anxious to try and make any change, and when you do, your anxiety holds you down and prevents you from engaging it completely.  Your mind is so consumed with explaining and justifying its anxiousness that is has no time to plan or strategize on how to improve things -- it has a full-time job being miserable, contemplating misery, interpreting misery in your surroundings, extrapolating your current misery into a thousand spiraling possible paths of future miseries.

Deep inside you, there's a lingering sense that maybe it doesn't have to be like this.  Maybe if you could overcome your anxiety, maybe if you could break away from the forces standing on your chest and just breathe, maybe if you could just identify the piece of the puzzle you have been getting wrong and correct it, then maybe, *maybe*, you could return to the way you were before.  Maybe your creativity is just sitting underneath the surface, waiting to begin thinking about the future again and all of the wonderful possibilities that await you when you overcome your malaise.

Ha, your creative mind says.  Look around you.  Look at yourself.  There are a million reasons preventing you changing, from grasping hold of yourself and moving forward.  You didn't forget about all of them, did you?  Not to worry.  I'll be here all night.