The wounds we impose on ourselves psychically can be far more painful and lasting than the ones we physically inflict. I find it interesting that the etymology of the word psychic stems from the latin word psychicus meaning “relating to the soul”. When we wound our psyche we damage our soul.
We have all heard of the artist/writer/actor/ insert blank ______________ creative who was brilliant but self-destructive. Alcohol and drug abuse, the burning of art, bipolar disorder and depression, and sometimes eventual, sometimes sudden suicide – the ultimate destruction of self.
I look at poets like Bukowski and wonder how much more productive he could have been if he had all his shite together. I also wonder, would he have been quite as raw and captivating with his words if he had been polite, calm and abstained from damaging practices like alcohol and smoking? Perhaps he would have still been an amazing writer but just entertained a different audience.
This capacity for both creation and destruction from within is our dual dilemma as humans. Because of it, every major religion and spiritual practice has a god of creation and one of destruction, and sometimes that same god is capable of both.
Excerpt from Evil Twin – The Steps We Take Within
As power rises up
so a cloud follows
doubt trailing action
if you let it
what springs from the head
creates a twin
even at the moment of inception…
2020 was a massive year of creation not just for me but for many others. As the pandemic raged, the human spirit created art, baked and danced questionably on Tik Tok.
My creation story of 2020 goes like this..
I started Audacity, a monthly online digital magazine, and published my second poetry book, “The Steps We Take Within”. Aside from this, I also wrote my first novel. I was fortunate in that not one but two publishers accepted it. I created almost daily blog posts and built up a fair sized Twitter and Instagram following. I also opened a Patreon account, and undertook various courses in all sorts of interesting fields. Just thinking about 2020 exhausts me. But it also excites me. How did I do all that?
And also, why did I kill it?
Why?
We are creators, and we are destroyers, and we don’t have to be writers and artists to see the effects of these two energies in our lives. This is a human trait, not a device of artistic personality. The greater our capacity to create new growth for ourselves, the greater our propensity for self-destruction.
The blog post “Plant Medicine”, triggered me to look back over Audacity’s issues. I loved that magazine so much. As I flicked through the interviews and stories, I was in awe of the amount of work that had gone into every single issue.
I remembered how hard it was to pick up the phone and ask some of those characters for an interview. I had to learn so much! From how to use Canva to finding a digital magazine platform to publish to. I was learning how to use Mailchimp and grow a subscriber mailout list.
And that was just the beginning. I did so much learning and creating and then editing my writing to the enth degree because I didn’t want issues to go out with typos in them. It was an enormous amount of work. All self-generated. All self-motivated. All free. That output took a toll on my health and my relationships, and in the end, I had to take the beautiful creation that I loved so much and kill it.
Just so that I could sleep at night again
Just so that I could breathe
But destroying is as addictive as creating and once I began I couldn’t seem to stop.
I shut down every switch in that vast energy warehouse that I had built internally throughout 2020. I stood at the power board, turned off my blogging, and turned off my books (stalled at the editing of one, the marketing of another). I murdered everything. Nothing was left unscathed.
I walked away from Audacity whilst amid a new issue. I already had all my interviews lined up. It would be a cracker of an issue on essential oils and natural health. A subject that was close to my heart. I had a complete interview with Greg from Australian Essential Oils about how he had grown his company from seedling to the global supply company it is today. I had Denise from Aminya Academy and her story of forming the premier institution for learning clinical aromatherapy in Australia. I had more. I had so much. I was so close.
The truth is that the growth of Audacity frightened me. I had an ever-growing list of keen subscribers and extensive positive support and feedback from segments of both the local community and the global one. I could feel that it was growing very fast into a successful little magazine with a niche following. But it was all done for free, and I was just one person, and there were important things I was missing in our family business, and it was all becoming too much, so boom boom boom, I shut it down.
I failed myself, but I told myself I wasn’t failing because I chose the path, it didn’t happen to me, I chose it.
It was all a bit of a relief. Until it wasn’t. A couple of months later I had had my rest, caught up with all my other work, and baked enough cakes to heal the small rifts within my family. In the lull I realised the magnitude of what I had done. My sense of failure became more like quiet grief. I mourned the loss of my creations; I mourned the loss of myself, yet I also knew that I couldn’t return.
So it didn’t matter a jot that I “chose” to fail – failure was still the result, and so were the accompanying emotions.
I lived in a sort of limbo for two years and never realised the truth of anything I was doing, mainly because I didn’t look honestly at my life again until two weeks ago when I went for a job interview.
The sound of my high heels (the first I had worn in several years) sounded like nails being driven into the coffin of my creative self. I was burying myself, step by clicking step, in a pencil skirt and my funeral and business meeting plain white blouse. I looked just like an eminently employable woman should.
Inside I had qualms, this is where failing yourself leads you. This is where a lack of self-belief leads you. This is where a creative genius winds up when they are clearly no genius and have no creative left either. The dumb ones like me, decide they are best suited to a nice normal admin job. Plus I had a stellar resume that meant that ten minutes after I hit submit on Seek in response to an advertised position, I had an interview. The interview I was currently marching towards.
“What are you like with technology?”
This was the interview question that gave me an inkling of just how far I had fallen from my true self. “I’m excellent; I can teach myself anything I am interested in.”
“Interested in” being the sticking point, I thought, wishing that I hadn’t added that bit. Mentally I moved the full stop backwards. My interviewer hadn’t noticed my mistake because she didn’t know me. I could see her looking at the me who was on my very best behaviour; the interview had gone swimmingly, and she was wondering how soon I could start.
I prevaricated. I retreated. I did so gracefully. I could feel her offering me employment – wasn’t that what I wanted? No! My mind was mentally rehearsing running back to my car, tearing off my skirt and heels and pulling my worn jeans and sandals back on as fast as I could.
If you have made it here, you may question my mental state. Bless you 😂 thank you, it’s okay. I’ve always been highly resilient in that regard.
I am now moving forward again with creating.
My first novel. The same book that I wrote in and around Audacity. The novel that contained my beloved characters which I had so much fun creating, sat in a mentally unreachable river for two years. On the weekend, I threw down the line and fished it out.
After all that time, I am embarrassed to say it took a mere hour of focused work to clean up the final edits and completely delete and redo the last chapter—one hour.
I stand humbled and bow before my creator; I watch warily for my destroyer’s re-emergence.
The same force that two years ago mentally dragged my magazine, my books, and my writing self into a room, tied her to a chair and then coldly murdered her is still present – I can feel it in my heart.
We are dark and light, creators and destroyers of worlds – our worlds.
We are both our failure and our success.
Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something. If someone is better than you at something, then it is likely because she has failed at it more than you have. If someone is worse than you, it’s likely because he hasn’t been through all the painful learning experiences you have”
Mark Manson
We live within the same dual forces that shape our world and have done for centuries. We are human, we are divine, we are exceptional, and we are nothing very unique at all because one day, we die, just like everyone else.
So the only question left is, “how do you want to spend your time while you are here?”
I want to write, so here I am, writing and hitting publish again on another uncomfortably personal and hard-won post. My edited manuscript for Figments of Imagination is returning to the publishers for their comments. I have begun what will come the second book in that series. It begins again. Perhaps I will go up the hill with more wisdom and experience this time. If not, I am at least aware that my destroyer dogs my footsteps and her outline looks a lot like my own.
Thanks for reading; I realise it was a long monologue, a bit selfish. More poetry is on the way over the week.
Love your creator, respect your destroyer; in the end, we are all just coins flipping in the air. I hope you land sunny side up.🪙 💕🦋
Header photo courtesy Aaron Thomas Unsplash
My second poetry book “The Steps We Take Within”, which I published without much marketing at the end of 2020, deserves a mention. I read through it over the week-end. It contains over one hundred poems, some stolen from this blog (and therefore, they don’t appear here anymore). Some of them are not so bad, the entire book probably should have been cut by 50% but hindsight is 2020, literally.
The links to where you can purchase – should you be so inclined after that red-hot advertising gambit – are above my home page. For the Australian link, just click the picture.
