I recently read an interesting blog post about the need to find meaning in life.
My visceral response was: “I have meaning.” But what did I mean exactly? After all, it seems a little arrogant, like I am claiming access to some cosmic secret denied to others. Of course, that was not what I meant at all. I have no idea “why” I am here or what my place is in the grand scheme of the universe.
The universe does not grant meanings, but that is okay. I would rather create my own than robotically carry out some plan devised by another. “Meaning” does not have to be cosmic anyway. What I am describing is a sense of focus and direction that brings satisfaction, a sense of rightness about my life course.
I feel like I know what it is to have meaning, because I have experienced how it feels to be without it. The most meaningless my existence has ever felt was when I became creatively blocked right after I went on bipolar disorder medication, and my mood flat-lined. My efforts to write led to terrible mood crashes, and I hated everything I wrote.
I had seen myself as a writer but now I experienced the world as a scattered mess, a chain of random events, without context and no sense that they were related to each other in any significant way. I got up. I ate. I showered. I went to bed.
I found some solace in the regularity of my routine. I looked forward to the changing of the seasons because they let me know my life was moving whether I felt it or not. I found pleasure in video games and although I enjoyed them, they were not enough to satisfy my need for context.
Was my life really meaningless then? I think not. Those writing-deprived years became the basis for a more lasting recovery from block than I had ever had before. My unproductive period led to insights I use every day as a writer. But my life certainly felt meaningless to me at the time.
Even before my depression, I had always been blocked as a writer on and off. Writing scared me even though – and maybe because – people had always told me I was good at it. I was harshly self-critical and writing often sent my mood into a death spiral, which meant writing was risky.
I have written about my creative recovery many times in my blog and in my book A Trail of Crumbs to Creative Freedom, so I will not go into it much here, except to say that I stopped listening to advice from other writers and began thinking for myself. I relearned how to own my writing the way I had as a kid and I rediscovered the fun, which had gotten lost somewhere along my educational path.
I am a skeptic. I do not believe in magic. But my transition from block to creativity felt magical. Hope surged, and the future began to look interesting. I had previously believed I would never enjoy writing again, but the daily activity of writing gave me focus, direction, and satisfaction. It felt meaningful.
It may sound silly for me to say writing is the meaning of my life, and I doubt all writers feel that way. To some it is just a job and not even an especially rewarding one. Those who see writing as just a job sometimes talk about quitting writing after they have reached a certain number of books.
I am always baffled to hear writers say that they are planning to quit. As long as I have the ability to write, I will never quit because writing is the way I make sense of my life. I am not just a writer when I write. I am constantly observing people, describing objects and settings in my head, noticing the tiniest details as potential material for stories.
On a therapeutic level, writing frames my emotions. If I cry, the writer in me is there taking notes. What does crying feel like? What muscles are involved? Is crying something I only do with my eyes, or is my whole body affected? How can I use my emotional experience in a story? The simple act of describing an experience is to command; to transform; to own; and to create.
Most people can be perfectly happy without writing. Writing is not the only meaning there is, and I am afraid to be too dogmatic about my meaning, as some are. People who try to impose their own “meaning” onto others are people I like to avoid.
But, as meanings go, I could do worse.
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