On anxiety and creativity: when navigating ambiguity, storytelling can be dangerous

exploring the stories we tell ourselves when no one is watching or, maybe worse, when it seems everyone is

You’re never going to kill storytelling because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.” —Margaret Atwood

In the last few weeks, life has felt particularly heavy due to many unknowns.

I found myself navigating the process of buying a new house during a faltering economy and job uncertainty; meanwhile, my husband was diagnosed with a genetic disease, hemochromatosis, which makes the body store too much iron. This diagnosis came at a time when he can still reverse damage, but we had to go from appointment to appointment to determine this.

The stress of unknowing settled in my neck and blurred my thoughts.

Photo by Darius Bashar

In the days of unknowing, while we also waited for an inspection on the new house and test results to come in, my head pulsed with pain and, I’ll admit, my imagination went wild. Migraines always hit me during times of stress, and these past few weeks have been particularly rough.

I kept reaching for the one thing I’d been doing less of since returning from Vermont: writing to find out what I actually thought. Writing to process. Writing to journal and dream. Writing to connect to a different part of myself—the part that doesn’t feel anxiety but, rather, flow.

When I was 19 and began writing compulsively, I had started for purely therapeutic reasons.

I found that writing was a way of building self-awareness but also exploring the stories that fed my anxieties. Seeing my own thoughts in black and white showed me how my mind worked and helped me to clarify my existence.

Writing alone in a room with a question or two propelling me forward and my imagination focused on creation, rather than explanation, led me to what Joseph Campbell called the path of bliss. It was a freedom and coming home to curiosity over speculation.

Anxiety, I firmly believe, is just creative energy working against us. It is pure speculation. And it’s addictive, especially when the world feels heavy.

A life of creative exploration, à la Hurston (see last blog post), is innately fulfilling but easy to lose track of when we get caught up in our own stories about the past and future. Or stories about how the world should act or react to what we do.