Creating from Pain vs. Joy: The Truth About Great Art

Wake-Up Call #45

It’s a lament I’ve heard so many times.

From writers. Painters. Composers. Chefs. Singer-songwriters. Artists and performers, across nearly every genre or mode of expression. Even leaders and innovators, entrepreneurs, and execs.

If I stop suffering, will I still be able to do great work? Make great art?

Bit of a weird example, but stay with me…

I once knew someone who build a wildly successful chain of custom retail apparel locations. Beyond driven. Stunningly creative, inventive, successful by any measure. A true artist. They were trendsetters, taste-makers. Both in their designs, and the businesses they built.

Then their dad died.

The very same dad whose outward success, at least measured in the size of the enterprise, the revenue generated, and status accumulated, was a billion times bigger.

Within a year, my friend’s entire business, every location had closed. The fire was gone. The inferiority and dominance wound that drove so much of their relentless push to make, to innovate, to succeed closed with the passing of their dad. And, along with it, went the source-fuel to do the undoable. To create the uncreatable.

Turns out, all that creative juju wasn’t coming from joy or wholeness, it was coming from pain. Along with a bone-deep desire to be seen. Acknowledged. Enough.

This is the unspeakable fear of so many makers. That if and when the wound heals—the pain cedes—the drive and creativity will take its leave.

We’re not supposed to talk about this.

It’s considered verboden.

The notion that suffering—pain born of a wound, often torn, then held open, at an early age—may, in the context of creative expression and volume of output, have piercing value. We don’t want it to be true, even though we know it is. And, we know, equally well, that less constructively-directed, the very same pain can lead not to revelation and expression, but rather, complete and utter devastation.

We want to believe we can create, do, or build on a similar scale, with an equivalent path to honesty and impact, and, if appropriate, income, from a fully-healed place. That we don’t “need” suffering as a source-fuel for great art, transformational experiences, or breathtaking things. That we can summon the drive to make manifest the impossible, equally from a place of wholeness. Bliss. Samadhi.

Except, it’s a lie.

Well, actually, it’s more of a partial truth.

Yes, great work can come from a place of healing and wholeness. It can. No, really.

I think back to so moments in my younger days, lost in a trance of collective effervescence, utterly gone, on a dance floor, a thousand sweaties co-creating a living work of art to the beats of a DJ whose joyful elation poured out through stacks and stacks of speakers. I’ve actually been that person (in a much younger version), creating an offering, in realtime, of born of pure generosity and joy.

I’ve seen artists channel portraits as expressions of pure love, read sentences from writers and poets that poured out of lifted hearts. It can, and does happen. And what a wonderful aspiration.

But, that does not obviate a darker truth. That great art, progress, commerce, success can and often is motivated, given grist, by the suffering of an unhealed essence.

Rather than deny this, what if we accepted it?

“Yes, and,” as they say in improv.

We can birth beauty, greatness, sublime offerings from the ever-tumbling, relentlessly-shifting cacophony of states that define the human condition.

We we can craft stunning work from a place of brokenness. When we’ve found a way to transmute the energy and emotion into soulful, honest expression. And, maybe, our own healing. Do not, however, make the mistake of holding the wound open in the name of sustaining a path to creation. The harm always outweights the charm.

We can bring forth work that lets us be seen and embraced, and touch deep into others from a place of peace, healing, and ease. And, to live from this place, infuses art, especially the art of our lives, with grace.

And, now the truthiest truth. Most of us live and create in the space of the in-between.

Even there, we can offer work that matters, to us and others, from that middle place, navigating an inescapably human bittersweetness born of both joy and longing. The one my dear friend,

Susan Cain

describes so wisely and tenderly in her beautiful book, Bittersweet:

…bittersweetness is not, as we tend to think, just a momentary feeling or event. It’s also a quiet force, a way of being, a storied tradition—as dramatically overlooked as it is brimming with human potential. It’s an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world. Most of all, bittersweetness shows us how to respond to pain: by acknowledging it, and attempting to turn it into art, the way the musicians do, or healing, or innovation, or anything else that nourishes the soul. If we don’t transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect. But if we realize that all humans know—or will know—loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other.

In the end, isn’t that what it’s really all about. Taking whatever life gives us, and leaning on it as a tether to more readily, and easily, turn toward each other.

Is there any better art, no matter it’s origin, than that which makes us see, and be seen?

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Wake-Up Call #45 | Where are you creating from?

Consider what you’ve been focusing on lately. Where you’re “creative juices” have been directed. Where you’ve been working hard to make something happen.

What is the vision behind it? The ultimate expression you’re working toward?

Now, ask, “why? what’s it motivating me to make this thing, to work this hard, to give it the form, shape, love even, mapped by this vision?”

Don’t think the answer, though. Feel it.

Don’t rationalize or judge it. Open to it.

We all have elements of every state within us, at any given moment.

If you are making from the wound right now, how powerful that you’ve found a path to process what you’re experiencing in a way that becomes art that helps you, and others feel seen.

If you’re creating from a place of wholeness right now, how wonderful you’ve found a way to express yourself from a place of gentleness and generosity.

If you’re expressing yourself from somewhere in the messy middle, how amazing that you’re human, living, grappling, exploring and doing the dance of being present to what comes up, and channeling it into something that feels honest. An offering, even if just to yourself.

We can, and often do, make in different ways, and for different reasons, as we move through different experiences and seasons of life.

It’s part of what lets us, as Susan said, turn toward each other. And, maybe equally important, return home to ourselves.

As always, these words, questions, and thoughts are offered as an invitation, an invocation, not a proclamation.

Love to hear your thoughts in the comments, if you’re inclined.