For Those Who Are Afraid to Heal

Dysfunction can be habit forming.

It’s amazing the number of people who continue to suffer because they are afraid that if they resolve old wounds or aren’t in pain anymore, they will no longer be who they are. And in a way, that’s great, because obviously they like who they are and don’t want to change the essential thing that encapsulates their uniqueness.

But pain isn’t unique. It’s pretty darn common. What these folks are attached to is how they respond to their pain, or how they deal with their on-going discomfort, not the actual pain itself. Pain is just pain. How a person deals with it is what defines them.

Wouldn’t you rather love yourself for how you respond to joy? 

No? You like the shadow stuff, huh. Okay, I get that. I really, really get that. Me and my shadow have strolled down many an avenue, and there is something so appealingly bad-ass about the gritty dark. Bottle in one hand, blunt in the other, swaggering down the street in the wee hours . . . That was another life, another time, and I barely recognize that young, unhappy, ever-so-slightly dangerous woman, but she’s in here somewhere, hopefully passed out and not trying to get out. I’m way too old for that shit.

So yeah, I get it. But I got over it, too. And I am still me. In fact, I’m more me now than I have ever been.

I know a couple of people who are so dependent on their pain that they sabotage any effort at relief. This is a harsh truth, but their pain keeps them from having to really try at anything in their lives, and they have found a network of care-givers who enable them to simply coast. I was on one of those teams for a long time, and after one too many close calls with getting better, I quit, and quit hard. Livid pissed I think is the appropriate description.

Those are extreme cases, and I encounter few people as bad off as that, because those people don’t want healing so they avoid me like the plague, and that’s actually alright with me.

But I do tend to hang with creatives–in fact I will be so bold as to say my life is populated with about 99% creatives–and depression, anxiety and OCD are pretty much a given in this population. Yes, including me.

And lots of us are terrified that if we kick the demon off one shoulder, the angel on the other will leave, too. 

Creativity is such a mystery. We don’t understand how it works, and most of us live in fear that each time we finish a song or a painting or a poem it will be our last. The rational part of us knows that’s bullshit, but the irrational part, the superstitious part–the part that wears the unwashed lucky sweatshirt or hasn’t changed the strings on the songwriting guitar for so long they have become a new civilization–overrules the rational part every goddam time because we just don’t know how creativity works – but we know when we aren’t doing it we’re in deep trouble.

So we cling to what we believe drives us, and all too often it’s pain. And it’s so easy to write about our pain, to write about our longing for what we don’t have, about being rejected or abandoned, about our emptiness and our fear and our sadness and our anger. That shit just flows out onto the paper like blood from an open wound. There’s no stopping it.

Somebody should make a t-shirt for songwriters that says got unrequited? Seriously.

I keep running across a young songwriter on Facebook who writes from his pain, and at first I thought he was engaging and interesting and had a cool vibe – and then I got sick of hearing the same sad shit, over and over, set to a new melody. That’s some songwriting hemophilia there, dude, eesh, get help. And then I realized a second later that he never will, because he’s addicted to dysfunction and is terrified of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If he starts feeling better, he fears he won’t be able to write compelling songs anymore.

There is precedent for this, oh yes, and plenty of it. Lots of artists dried out, cleaned up their lives, or got out of bad relationships, and their creativity went straight into the crapper. Legendary writers became cautionary tales. We have come to believe that happy doesn’t make good songs, no matter what Bobby McFerrin says.

But here’s where you might not be thinking this through – and this might sound a little harsh, but sometimes tough love is necessary. Do you really think the only pain worth writing about is yours? Do you really think that your suffering is such a valuable commodity? Are you really that arrogant? I know you, and I know you’re not. You just need to think about it for a minute.

You need to get pissed off about bigger, badder things, and write about them.

Like, what the fuck are those morons doing to our planet? Why the hell are corporations writing our laws? We know how to fix the vast majority of all the problems with climate change, world hunger, water pollution, air pollution and dying oceans–why the actual fuck are we not doing anything about any of it? Why do we mandate health insurance, house insurance, car insurance, business insurance, malpractice insurance . . . but not gun insurance? Who do these assholes think they are?

We need you writing those songs, with all the gut-wrenching angst and heartbreaking power of your most intensely painful breakup song. We need you to direct your well-practiced loathing outward to the institutions and individuals that are causing so much harm to so many living beings. Write with, to quote Mark Twain, “a pen warmed up in Hell.” Dip that nib in ink so befouled with venom that it nearly dissolves the paper.

And once you have it out of your system. you can relax, have some herbal tea, and play with a whole box full of kittens. Yes, you can be totally happy for days on end and then boom, incendiary verbiage calling out corporate wankery and the shadiest of doings. Focus your anger outward instead of inward. Or your sadness, your heartbreak, your longing. Want a better world? So does everybody – hey! It’s something everyone can identify with and it’s got feels!

It won’t cure you, but studies are proving that spending time creatively is far more effective than pharmaceuticals at changing moods and improving functionality, so it’s a win. If you are going to be creative with your unhappiness, you may as well work toward creating a world you want to be happy in. Besides, self-loathing is pretty limiting, just the one person there to direct all that dissatisfaction toward. But rage against a corrupt and tyrannical system that rewards the worst possible behavior and shits on everybody else? We just can’t seem to run out of that no matter how hard we try. Take a second helping from the buffet. Take some to-go. We’ll make more.

Point is, you will still be you, reacting to pain and suffering, writing about the wounded and the broken, raging against injustice–it’s all about the gritty dark, where we do our best work. But instead of suffering, you can shine.

If it weren’t for the dark, we’d never see the stars. Subscribe and see the stars every week.