There’s a joke about a writer and her therapist that I’ve seen various versions of over the years. The writer complains about how terrible the writing is, how difficult it is to show up each day, how the writing is blocked, the writing is bad, she can’t sleep or eat or think. Every day the thought of trying to write wrecks her; every day she vows to do better, to write more, and then the day ends with writing that isn’t enough, isn’t any good, isn’t what she wanted.
Exasperated, the therapist finally suggests that she could stop writing. “Stop?” says the writer, blinking in surprise.
“Yes,” says the therapist.
There’s a long pause while the writer works this out. Then she blurts, “Dear gods, that would be worse!”
The joke works because we all know that the curse of the writer (or, of the artist generally) is to find the work of writing to be terrifically difficult while also feeling entirely compelled to pursue it at all costs. The only thing worse than writing, as the saying goes, is not writing.
But what makes it so hard? Rollo May has an idea:
[C]reativity provokes the jealousy of the gods. This is why authentic creativity takes so much courage: an active battle with the gods is occurring.
May, The Courage to Create, page 27
Now, there’s an excuse. You haven’t been struggling against a blank page, but going toe-to-toe with Athena. You haven’t been defeated by a metaphor but burned down to cinders by Helios. Your legs hurt not because you’ve been sitting in this chair for so long but because you have chased Poseidon to the bottom of the sea.
Jokes aside, there’s something here, I think. The idea that when we make something—a pleasing sentence or story, a painting, a typeface or lyric or melody—we become like gods, we channel some power through ourselves that allows something to come into the world that wasn’t there before.
It brings to mind this passage from Circe, in which the nymph considers why she has become a witch:
By rights, I should never have come to witchcraft. Gods hate all toil, it is their nature. The closest we come is weaving or smithing, but these things are skills, and there is no drudgery to them since all the parts that might be unpleasant are taken away with power. The wool is dyed not with stinking vats and stirring spoons, but with a snap. There is no tedious mining, the ores leap willing from the mountain. No fingers are ever chafed, no muscles strained.
Witchcraft is nothing but such drudgery. Each herb must be found in its den, harvested at its time, grubbed up from the dirt, culled and stripped, washed and prepared. It must be handled this way, then that, to find out where its power lies. Day upon patient day, you must throw out your errors and begin again. So why did I not mind? Why did none of us mind?
I cannot speak for my brothers and sister, but my answer is easy. For a hundred generations, I had walked a world drowsy and dull, idle and at my ease. I left no prints, I did no deeds. Even those who had loved me a little did not care to stay.
Then I learned that I could bend the world to my will, as a bow is bent for an arrow. I would have done that toil a thousand times to keep such power in my hands. I thought: this is how Zeus felt when he first lifted the thunderbolt.
Miller, Circe, page 83
That is, creativity is so powerful it makes a greater god out of the lesser. Of us, it gives a glimpse of something else—the awareness of being alive right now, truly living, the bone-deep knowledge that the world is a different place with you in it, that your living brings about some change. The power that Circe feels, that we feel—it’s not the power of immortality but rather the power of life.
So the writer’s rebuke is apt: however difficult the work, stopping would indeed be worse.
Gargi Bhattacharyya rightly connects the impulse to “self-improvement” with coming face-to-face with our own mortality:
The secular religions of self-help, self-care, and self-improvement are devised to meet this horror. The central tenet of each circles around regret and the avoidance of regret, all of which could be summarized as an injunction against mourning your own life. At the same time, the differently constituted anxiety of the age of social media pushes home the uncomfortable knowledge that none of us can in fact do it all, and also that however much we are doing, it will come to an end.
Living a life well lived must surely include coming to an acceptance of your own finitude. Including an acceptance of what cannot be and what cannot be done. Of the time that there will not be to fill. Of the countless paths that can never be taken. Serenity must include an ability to register the ever-spiralling possibilities and snippets of other not-yet-imagined lives and to be at ease in our connectedness to what others have been and done but that we will never do ourselves.
Bhattacharyya, We, the Heartbroken, page 96
I think here of how difficult it can be to make a decision, the agony in wanting to make the right choice, knowing all the while that “right” is impossible. There’s an oft-unspoken effort to avoid regret in that agonizing. But that effort represents a kind of paradox: the anguish exists because regret is inevitable. To live is to regret.
More than that, to live well is to care for your regrets, to accept their role as teacher and guide. In Madeline Miller’s Circe, the witch-goddess speaks one evening with Telemachus, son of Odysseus. They have confessed their sins to each other: he of the murders he committed at Odysseus’s command, she of how she created Scylla, the monster who torments sailors. Telemachus says:
“Her name...Scylla. It means the Render. Perhaps it was always her destiny to be a monster, and you were only the instrument.”
“Do you use the same excuse for the maids you hanged?”
It was as if I had struck him. “I make no excuse for that. I will wear that shame all my life. I cannot undo it, but I will spend my days wishing I could.”
“It is how you know you are different from your father,” I said.
“Yes.” His voice was sharp.
“It is the same for me,” I said. “Do not try to take my regret from me.”
He was quiet a long time. “You are wise,” he said.
“If it is so,” I said, “it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes.”
Miller, Circe, page 373
Wisdom arises from foolishness, from errors and wrongs. From regret. Do not let anyone take your regret from you! Do not dishonor it by flinching when it shows its face. It is both what made you who you are, and a tool for weaving a different world.
