Retiring the whip of Self-Help
By: Jane Garnett
Tags: Acceptance, Creative Writing, Creativity, Elizabeth Gilbert, Self Help

Retiring the whip of Self-Help

The now legendary self-help book “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear” was crack for my creative insecurity. It wasn’t Elizabeth Gilbert’s fault and it wasn’t exactly mine. We were all doing our best — hers to teach, and mine to receive her wisdom — but I’d like to take responsibility for my part in what happened.

“Big Magic” explodes the age-old image of the tortured artist in favor of “a different way…to cooperate fully, humbly, and joyfully with inspiration.” For a book about writing, “Big Magic” is shockingly full of positivity. So I perceived it as a gift from the gods at a time when I really wanted to break through my creative blocks. “Show up for your work day after day after day after day and you might get lucky enough some random morning to burst right into bloom,” Gilbert writes, and then goes on to wonder, “Since when did creativity become a suffering contest?”

Well, since you asked, Liz, since the very beginning. Since before I was born.

I’ve been listening to the maxims of creatives since I was a fetus. While I was in utero, somewhere in northern rural England, my painter mother sat in the kitchen, before an easel, her hand on her stomach. “Don’t paint!” she told me. “It’s too painful!” Then my writer father stumbled in for a whiskey refill, pausing to shout at me through the wall of my mother’s stomach, “Painting is easy! Just never ever write, O.K.? It’s a bloody nightmare!”

Unlike my parents who led me to reject the arts and find something easy to do, the only messages Gilbert received was to stick steadfast to her dream. Raised by honest to goodness hard working Americans, writes, “I never recall my parents expressing any worry whatsoever at my dream of becoming a writer.” Reading that, I had to look at my own jealousy- never a fun emotion to examine.

Despite my heavy programming (or maybe because of it), I’ve always been obsessed with creativity. I wanted to be an artist but I was steered towards the more stable terrain of Oxford university. After an literature education that had me pick postmodern holes in every brilliant but tormented writer in the canon, I further cemented my understanding that the fate of the writer was worse than death. So I turned to making movies instead. Movies had words and art smuggled into them plus filmmaking seemed fun! Perhaps in Hollywood I would find the pure, painless expression and the permission to be an artist I’d always been seeking…

Oh well.

Eventually I became a therapist whose clients all happened to be writers, artists, and filmmakers. And it was then, thirteen years ago, that my research of creative pain truly began. Some of my clients were wildly successful, others unknown. All wanted to create more, or more authentically or more peacefully. The themes were deeply familiar to me and archetypal: fear of judgement and failure, fear of being seen, desire to be seen, and desire to find meaning. But each client needed to find his own unique solution, as did I. Nine years into my private practice, I eventually crossed paths with “Big Magic”.

After years of starting and stopping my own closeted creative writing, I’d stuck gold! Finally, a creative self-help book that was practical and full of common sense! I latched onto Gilbert’s words, hoping that with each re-read of “Big Magic” I would absorb more and more of its no-nonsense approach. And yet, not only did Gilbert’s advice not penetrate, but I found my neurosis around writing increasing; I somehow managed to use Gilbert’s wise words as further evidence of my artistic inferiority, if this level of unflinching positivity is what’s required I’ll never get there! Of course my victim position only proved Gilbert that points about the debilitating futility of creative fear.

“Take your fears and hold them upside down by their ankles and shake yourself free,” Gilbert instructs.

But, like, how? Maybe I just needed more therapy.

Everything about her very grown-up advice was triggering sulky comebacks.

“The creative process is both magical and magic,” Gilbert writes.

But is it though?

“Speak to your darkest and most negative interior voices the way a hostage negotiator speaks to a violent psychopath,” Gilbert advises, “calmly but firmly.”

You have no place here, I told my inner critic. Please give me time to think. But my inner critic just laughed at me as if her mouth was full of knives.

“Just write anything and put it out there with reckless abandon,” Liz declares.

I put pen to paper and wrote, I can’t do this I can’t do this I can’t do this.

“Here’s a trick,” says Gilbert (on my most heavily earmarked page, 117). “Stop complaining.”

Was it me or did she sound angry? Had I somehow not only failed in not becoming like Gilbert but also done something to actively upset her?

Another pearl of wisdom from Liz: “Please try to relax.”

Relax about this issue that has plagued me for eternity?! She should relax! I’ll simply have to try harder! Maybe I can write something hugely successful and win Gilbert’s admiration, or better yet, apology!

“Resist the seductions of grandiosity, blame and shame.”

But Liz! What else is there?

I imagined my question bouncing off her radiant face like teflon.

Why couldn’t I be more like Liz, deeply connected to creative inspiration, or as she called it, “the mystery”? “While it’s happening,” Liz tells us, “I thank the mystery for its help. And when it departs, I let the mystery go, and I keep on working diligently anyhow, hoping that someday my genius will reappear… whether I am touched by grace or not, I thank creativity for allowing me to engage with it at all.”

Liz’s holy stance flashes me back to my ten-year-old buddy Louise who could stretch out the eating of a single potato chip to five minutes by taking very tiny bites with her front teeth like a rabbit. It was a wildly successful strategy for savoring snacks and thirty-five years later, my sense of bewildered admiration still remains.

Despite the gulf between my way and Liz’s, I remained a zealot as long as I could, determined that Liz had cracked it and my whole life was a lie. It was a relief to finally know what was wrong with me and everyone else! I found myself spouting off to my clients: Art doesn’t have to be painful! Art is a privilege! It’s really just about doing it! You can be healthy and joyful and be an artist!

But my clients were not as impressed as I was. I figured I was probably just further along on the spiritual journey and could therefore admit I’d been wrong about the intrinsic entanglement of art and suffering. Oh god how I longed to be wrong!

But over time, despite my re-readings, I wasn’t getting the desired results. Liz’s grownup approach continued to constellate the rebellious teen in me. The more I rebelled, the more helpless I felt. Plus, my skin wasn’t thickening, nor were my piles of pages. In fact, I’d started using Gilbert as a way to shame myself further. I should just relax into the joy of creativity! I should take myself less seriously! I was using Big Magic to, as psychologist Clayton Barbeau says, “should” all over myself.

So I took a new angle, looking instead at what was helping my own clients: Me really listening to them. Radical acceptance of exactly where they were in the process. Allowing the conflicted nature of the beast. Helping them feel their way into their own rhythms. I started pretending I was my own client. How could I actually help myself? I looked at my programming and my history and how, over time, I’d turned my debilitating self-criticism into a whip to try to go faster, and to override my own conflict.

One thing became clear. It was time to retire the whip and generate a whole lot of patience and kindness. One of the lines of “Big Magic” that stands out to me still is, “This is a world, not a womb,” a sentence that, for me, carries the spirit of the whip. She’s technically right as always, but not everyone is so anchored and securely attached, they can march out of the womb and onto the creative battlefield. Many people have severe unmet needs that interfere with functioning on multiple levels. Some people don’t know what unconditional support even looks like. Some people never played as children and don’t know how to use their imaginations. Some people never learned follow-through or the value of hard work. Sometimes to enter the world in a state of high functioning, we need to re-womb ourselves through self-care and therapy and learn to meet our own unmet needs, not just get out that whip to override them.

For the past six months I’ve made an intention to retire the whip, perhaps in a glass cabinet, along with my grandparents’ china. Sometimes it sneaks out and tells me I’m underperforming (it’s only trying to help), but I return it gently to the cabinet. I’ve told myself I’ll never be Gilbert and that’s ok. It’s time to stop focusing on the titanic workhorse I’m not, and look at the creative creature I am. Capricious, defensive, and wounded as I may be, my creativity creature is a shapeshifter; she’s shy, whimsical, recalcitrant. Sometimes she won’t speak. Other times she gushes with so many wild fantasies and convoluted ideas, she could outwit the most patient team of scribes. She’s not fully grown up yet, and that’s ok.

When it comes to writing we don’t have to follow an established template of what being an artist should look like. The idea that art can come from joy is valid. So is the idea that pain and creation are intertwined. Look no further than childbirth. Can we stop arguing about universal creative codes? Can we relax about pain-gain ratios and simply learn to savor our own uniqueness? Can we stop handing off our own power to self-help gurus, put away our self-help books, and learn to show up fully for ourselves?

I feel like Gilbert would support my conscious uncoupling from her. I feel like she would want me to liberate myself from my internal battles with her and get back to …well… writing, I guess.