Mad, bad, and dangerous to know

Feeling Sad Makes Us More Creative (The Frontal Cortex)

I sometimes feel the opposition of in-authenticity from others for my brutal honesty. Ever since I was a child I’ve always been very open, honest and vulnerable and unable to comprehend anything else, really. Consequently I’ve had some of the most enriching relationships I’ve ever witnessed- full of passion and vitality and growth and soulful investment. I hold little stock in people who do not value (and can not demonstrate) actions of honesty- with others & themselves. It takes courage, strength and extraordinary character to be comfortable enough to embrace the variety of emotions we all experience. I wanted to share this article with all of you- as I think it is very important, in particular to our current generation and it’s highly disconnected nature and popular culture. I want to encourage everyone to embrace the variety of things they feel (good and bad) and to channel these things positively. Do not punish yourself for having emotions, nor trap or hide them- I truly believe it is meant for us to feel these things so we may grow and be resilient beautiful creators. I hope this encourages you.

psychotherapy:

For thousands of years, people have speculated that there’s some correlation between sadness and creativity, so that people who are a little bit miserable (think Van Gogh, or Dylan in 1965, or Virginia Woolf) are also the most innovative. Aristotle was there first, stating in the 4th century B.C.E. “that all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.” This belief was revived during the Renaissance, leading Milton to exclaim, in his poem Il Penseroso: “Hail, divinest melancholy/whose saintly visage is too bright/to hit the sense of human sight.” The romantic poets took the veneration of sadness to its logical extreme, and described suffering as a prerequisite for the literary life. As Keats wrote, “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”

Well, it turns out the cliché might be true after all: Angst has creative perks. That, at least, is the conclusion of Modupe Akinola, a professor at Columbia Business School, in her paper “The Dark Side of Creativity: Biological Vulnerability and Negative Emotions Lead to Greater Artistic Creativity”…