How to Beat Anxiety During the Writing Process

Anxiety has often been associated with my creativity, and upon reading May's third chapter on the unconscious and creativity, I find it a relief to see that another person admits and addresses the neuroses that is creativity. May quotes: "As Picasso remarked, 'Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction'" (May 60). This is where the anxiety comes in for me: can I effectively deconstruct my vision and then reconstruct it onto paper, without leaving out any details? Will it make sense? Is it a fruitless, waste of time in which I learned nothing more of myself than the fact that I can waste time and write absurdities with the best of them?

But as May continues, these brief moments of anxiety are coupled with the moments of gratification of the breakthrough that follows; the unconscious never fails to supply. It is up to the creator to receive. It is like we are an antenna, catching the radio waves of the unconscious. If something is a bit off, the transmission fails, but the unconscious continues to supply; it is the antenna which fails. May states: "[Jung] believed the relationship was compensatory: consciousness controls the wild, illogical vagaries of the unconscious, while the unconscious keeps the consciousness from drying up in banal, empty, arid rationality" (May 59). To me, every day fills the unconscious with the radio waves it needs to radiate to my consciousness; it is merely a matter of me recalling the emotion, the sight, the smell of today and relaying it in a moment in writing tomorrow. Encounters, conversations and looks contribute even when I am not paying attention, or at least think I am not paying attention. "Language is the symbolic repository of the meaningful experience of ourselves and our fellow human beings down through history, and as such, it reaches out to grasp us in the creating of a poem" (May 85). It is the small details in which I find the greatest inspiration and intimacy of creation.

There is no doubt that creating is a labor of love; it follows the reproductive methods of man. It is joyful, and fearful, and exhausting. At once, I am one with my work and outside of my work, watching it grow within me, embedded in the deep confines of my mind, waiting to be born on paper. I am the proverbial mother: cautious and loving of the works within my soul. Each is my child, loved equally and individually. I have been pregnant my entire life with words and images, gestating deep inside of me; the immaculate conception of another world, carried within the womb of my soul. I give birth to myself with each word typed, spoken and thought, and that is anxiety in the raw.

May, Rollo. The Courage to Create. New York: Norton Publishing, 1994.