Creative Guilt!💗[25-11-23]
Conversational-Confessional-Guilty Conscience!.🤍
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25 November 2023
Dear Chasers💗
The black cloud looming over my head this morning felt powerfully disorientating, thankfully it wasn’t committed to stay with me all day but it made me think about this slightly distressing occurrence that just keeps on happening to me after I write something slightly off the wall or possibly vaguely incoherent to anyone but me. It’s not the posting it publicly that gives me the creeps it’s the actual fact that I could write like that! Why?
I’m not suggesting that there’s any connection to this at all but it was definitely (almost) a full moon last night. I also had a late coffee and stayed awake working until 4:00 am then before getting off to bed, I quickly posted a short piece that took me roughly ten minutes to produce and get published. I even felt so self-assured about it that I restacked my own post! I’ve done that before in the past when I didn’t know any better (I still don’t understand the right’s and wrong ways to do things around here!).
Immediately after it was done I felt quite proud, content and satisfied with my work. Then for a few minutes but before the power light on my laptop had faded to off, I was already getting nervous and unsettled, by the time my head hit the pillow my eyes sprung open in the pitch black of the dark. I was one hundred percent agitated. I felt like I had just sent a drunken text to my ex and by the time I realised he wasn’t going to reply - the fact that he didn’t reply - completely ‘sobered’ me up. I slipped into sleep.
Now, maybe this is where I should throw my hands up in the air and remind myself as part of working this thing out. I may or may not have had a conversation with someone who has this unexplainable but massive influence on me and the way my brain receives their presence, prior to my writing the piece I am talking about. I was mostly discussing their brand and music and how they should come over to Substack and all that. Then the influence they had was that all of a sudden I was transported back to my imaginary world where “if only everything could have worked out differently”. I think we have called out the culprit for all my feelings or failings as the case may or may not be. That’s it sorted. Let’s all go home. ha! ;-) It’s just not as simple as that.
“I tried telling myself that feeling guilty was just a sickness of some sort. That it was men without guilt who made progress in life. Men who were able to lie, to cheat, men who knew all the shortcuts. Cortez. He didn't fuck around. Neither did Vince Lombardi. But no matter how much I thought about it, I still felt bad.”
- CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Is having a clean conscience imperative to produce writing that is good enough for the soul?
In my opinion the short answer is not at all and a dirty or unclean one could be more valuable. I’m thinking of my own favourite writers of the Beat Poets. Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg (although I am not too familiar with his writing yet), Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson who was never part of the Beat Generation, no matter how hard people try to make him one. He was an outsider and changed literature with his experimental prose, but that is not enough to make him Beat. For one thing, he was much younger than the Beats. HST is my favourite writer of all time. I wonder if he ever felt creative guilt. LOL I doubt it.
Why do I seem to always get a writing hangover?
It could because I feel like what I have written is bad or worse it is too revealing or even worse than that it is too vague and not real writing at all!. It always happens to me when I feel like I shouldn’t have made it public, but not always that alone, I worry I should never have written it at all. Then I remind myself that many writers may write things that make them feel vulnerable at times and a lot of those times - it’s that which makes the art.
I wondered if anyone else ‘suffered’ from this strange, almost emotional reaction to their writing or creative work too?
I think its because I am afraid of my inspiration being revealed in any format not just in a relatively abstract way. I am afraid of my tendency toward limerence. I am fearful of the consequential repercussions. I am my own worst person for standing in my own way. I don’t get in my way when its time to do something considered to be stupid or making mistakes. I’m the 1980’s parent egging me on to “go on then if you won’t listen. Carry on - go touch keep fucking with that ‘plug’ then you’ll have to learn the hard way” and so I publish the unfiltered post and suffer later.
It’s not that I am just over-productive, you already know this I’m absolutely not. I am the overthinking, unorganised, binge writing, first draft shite, type of writer. I’m not sure if its something to do with speed typing as a legal secretary in my previous career (I don’t have a career now. Unless a career as a literary criminal could be my bag!) but I rush type. My hands are much faster than my mind at times and this proves to be an unproductive quality.. hence all the daft typos and missing words or added letters here and there. I do this and my point it that it doesn’t exhaust me in a physical way. Even mentally, I don’t burn out as such. I get bored. I believe that creative burnout comes about when there is maximum effort and work being put out without any recognition. I think the burnout comes from the unseen element of writing. The need to be seen and validated. If I had a reduction in hearts on my platform or my posts didn’t get so many views, I would probably face burnout myself - regardless of the quantity of writing I do. I get to a point where as soon as I am done saying whatever weird shit I have to say and the moment I realise “I’m Bored Now'“ then, I know that project is done. Not complete or polished just DONE.
Under the heading of Writing Hangover I found on Medium an article that was written by Daniel Rosehill:
Still not convinced that I’d found something concrete that accurately describes my plight I continued looking around. I read an article that discussed this topic before on Substack. I really enjoyed Kate McKean’s account and her story is here. I couldn’t relate entirely to Kate’s version or Daniel’s either. As both seemed to apply more directly to professional writers, authors and people who were writing a lot more than I ever do in one session.
Creative Guilt gives a name to what I think I am feeling and is a little similar to the way I felt but not exactly, because this, for me, wasn’t an exhaustion kind of feeling hanging over my head, it was more of a guilty conscience type of regret. Its that ‘drunken text’ realisation aspect of my publishing those posts, that has always been getting me down the morning after.
THE POST IN QUESTION…. or THE QUESTIONABLE POST!
All this miserable musing came about because of the above piece that I created last night for The Daily Chase called Ex-Snow Globe. Which was motivated by my muse (who hasn’t a real clue any of this is happening to me I imagine) and the writing style was inspired after reading NINE that’s a huge 9 chapters from Haruki Murakami’s novel Dance, Dance, Dance.
I don’t know what other way to describe it only as a piece of Imaginative Semi-Fiction based on real Emotions. That’s exactly what it was, so I will call it so. Just a muddle of imaginative scenarios made up of creative scenes symbolising other non-fiction thoughts and situations happening in my brain and the topics of writing are metaphors for some things I was really experiencing.
Could I Call It Creative Guilt?
Well, for me creative guilt isn’t in the time spent creating, the end goal, monetary motivation, ambition vs family maintenance. My guilt is not in the creative process but in the finished product.
I have come to the Near Email Length warning message so I am going to hop-skippity-jump from this post to a more comfortable little something which is preparing tomorrow’s playlist post. To subscribe to The Daily Chase in future go over here.
Thank you for reading me this morning! BIG soft Warm HUGS Lots of Love ..xxx💗
