18 December 2024

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When Compulsion Doesn’t Work

As well as being a therapist, I’m also a published author. I mostly work on novels, but have also published short fiction and personal essays. Speaking with an artist/friend a while back we agreed that, for those of us with a professional artistic practice, its not really a decision per se to create. It’s more a compulsion. And this can be helpful, at least in terms of productivity. And yet, recently, I’ve found that it can backfire.

That same ability to sit one’s proverbial butt down and get to work might not do us many favours if other areas our life — the work that actually pays the bills, our personal responsibilities — require us to, well, chill for a bit. In other words, it’s possible to be too good at an otherwise good thing sometimes, especially when burnout is lurking around the corner.

We ultimately aren’t doing ourselves any favours if we’re collapsing at our self-imposed finish line. We end up not being able to “be there” for our friends and loved ones, let alone be responsible to more practical responsibilities (our job-job, for example). I like to use the example of someone who’s learning a musical instrument; we plug away and plug away, and we’re doing really well, but then we find we hit a wall — we’re stuck practicing the same piece of music without a sense of moving forward. It becomes ironic that the thing which lifts us from our day-to-day toil ends up feeling too constricting. Speaking personally, as a sometimes musician, it’s good to take a break, so that at a later date we can come back and rediscover our relationship with music with a refreshed perspective. This can also apply to things such as going to the gym, learning a second language, even baking bread.

The things which give us joy, which serve to deliver us from the day-to-day toil of paying the bills, shouldn’t be a source of resentment. Although, generally speaking, treating these things with the discipline of a “job” can certainly be helpful in terms of productivity, they shouldn’t feel like a job. Humility takes many forms, and knowing when to take a break from a personal hobby or creative practice, to understand when we need a break in order to gain perspective is in itself, I feel, an art form.