It’s probably not a good thing that when I think of the amusing drama I have found in my life that I am inspired to create complicated artistic works as a way of wrestling with them. There are many examples of this (I have been a prolific writer in the course of my life, in several different types of writing and a wide variety of genres), but a few examples of this ought to suffice for the characteristic way I have of coping with life’s stress by pondering, exploring thought experiments, and then leaving behind a record of the concerns and anxieties of my mind, as if any were necessary to convince others that I was a particularly anxious person by nature. There are both positive and negative sides to this tendency of mine to ruminate on concerns as well as leave behind a record of them.

On the positive side, it has been a very useful, and probably even necessary, quality for me to possess the ability to ruminate about my troubles in such a way that I can think of possible solutions and find a way to get the thoughts outside of my head [1], especially when it is late at night and I am trying to sleep peacefully. Without having creative outlets for my mind, it is highly unlikely that I would have been able to survive with anything approaching sanity or the sort of friendliness and cheerfulness that people tend to see me possess despite living a life that has been full of a lot of stress and quite a great deal of worry. Anything that increases the quality of life and may even have preserved it from the gloomy moods that I have wrestled with from time to time has to be counted as a worthwhile quality to possess, even if it does possess some drawbacks.

There is no question, though, that this quality possesses some drawbacks. Among the worst drawbacks for this quality of mine in this present age is the sort of digital and paper trail that my musings leave behind. It is one thing to know that someone thinks about serious matters often, and writes about them, but it is another thing to leave public evidence of it that is cached and is able to be retrieved more or less indefinitely that will never entirely disappear as long as someone wants to find it. This tendency of mine to have my anxieties and concerns spill out into writing, especially blogging, is something that has not been an unmixed pleasure in my life and has indeed contributed on more than one occasion to the depth of stress and anxiety in my life. Sadly, that which was originally meant to reduce internal stress has often caused a great deal of external stress because of the reaction of other people to the fruits of my pondering and writing, which often causes offense to those who see as aggressive what is merely anxious.

Without going into too much detail about such unpleasant matters, I thought it would be interesting to give a brief example of the way in which my creativity is fired by anxiety in ways that only serve to complicate my life further. Last week, as I was driving home, I heard a recording of “Madman Blues” from John Lee Hooker [2] on one of the local radio stations here in Portland, and immediately I thought of someone who I happened to know who would probably sing such lyrics to me if he was a creative sort of fellow himself or as deeply attuned to the blues. The idea led me to ponder a song cycle about the blues relating to that sort of experience where everyone feels tormented and anxious about the same situation, but each of them acts in ways that make the situation more anxious and difficult to solve. To go into any more detail would make it far too easy to understand the exact situation I was thinking about, but all the same it can be both a good thing and a bad thing that my creative fires are stoked by anxiety, in that anxiety tends to spread, as anxious people make others anxious, and the actions we take to make ourselves more secure in our own minds may often make us less secure in reality because they make others insecure and desire escape even more. Still, creativity beats violence any day as a solution to the anxieties and worries of life, even if it paradoxically may leave a deeper and longer trail for others to see.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/08/15/breathe-2-am/

[2] http://www.guitarworld.com/down-and-dirty-g-love-john-lee-hooker