The Big Bad World of Creative Guilt
By Lydia Burrows
According to Chip Conley and his book Emotional Equations, we only have eight primary emotions; joy, anticipation, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise, fear and acceptance. His equation for guilt is as follows,
“Remorse = Regret + Guilt”.
If you're anything like me, guilt is a feeling you're very familiar with. Not because you're inherently evil or because you've made bad choices. But because you constantly have a feeling deep inside your creative soul that tells you, that you should be doing more. You should be more. You should express yourself more. Or that the thing that is missing in your life is an inability to commit to all of the creative things that are floating around in your head that you feel so incredibly passionate about but never fucking do anything about... you know?
It's a strange anomaly working in the creative sector. In so many ways it's a wonderful blessing to be able to be literally paid to suggest things to clients that you picked from a random part of your brain. Which might help to sell their new strawberry double-coated fun-sized Valentine's Day KitKat. However, being creatively inclined, also, for me anyway, comes with the burden of constantly thinking, constantly dreaming and constantly wanting to innovate, but we're out here spending our 9-5 selling strawberry double-coated fun-sized Valentine's Day KitKats and we feel guilty about all the creative things we'd rather be doing.
So how do we combat this? What can you practically do as someone who longs to create, but who feels that they don't have the time to truly commit to those passions in the depth of your soul? Well, here is some advice I've received. Some good, some to take with a grain of salt, and some that helped me.
Just be grateful.
As an anxiety ridden millennial, I'm all about that self love, go to therapy, practice GEM lifestyle. No hate here. But when feeling guilty about the lack of creativity I'm not able to give to a role, being grateful feels hard (especially when I was underpaid, lol, advertising am I right #weneedtounionise).
Stop caring.
This is an interesting one. Because in part I've learnt to totally agree... A very wise, very talented advertising great once said to me and I'm clumsily paraphrasing (can you tell I'm not a copywriter yet?) "You can't give 110% on every project you do. Not every piece of creative can be your baby. Some briefs just can't be incredible pieces of work. But more importantly, you'll burn yourself out and begin to resent those around you because you won't believe they're working as hard as you. Always do good work but, pick the projects to put extra love into."
Have A Side Hustle.
I'm tired.
For me getting over my creative guilt and an overarching worry or longing to do more creative things was eased when I took the pressure off these pursuits or ideas. Instead of sitting at my desk worried that I was never going to be an incredible photographer or start my own small business or art direct the most incredible sets I just started doing little things every day, for creative pleasure, just for me. Whether this was gardening or little bits of freelance work that I felt passionate about or taking pictures for Instagram. It somehow turned down the volume on my worry and the feeling of guilt to do more.
Elizabeth Gilbert put it much more eloquently than me in her book Big Magic; “you are not required to save the world with your creativity. Your art not only doesn’t have to be original it also doesn’t have to be important. Make your work for your own purposes and pleasure."
Create for you, whenever you like. Be curious about the process, take the pressure off the outcome. Plus, you don't even have to share it with anyone. Give your creative soul a little love to release the guilt.
