Creativity and life samples

Since I finished reading Cameron’s Floor Sample a couple of weeks ago, I’ve got a dunno what feeling when I think of that book. Since I myself couldn’t understand, explain or even name the feeling, I decided it wasn’t worth mentioning it.

It turns out that I’ve just run into this book again while searching something else on Amazon, and I couldn’t help reading some reviews. “Let’s see what feelings other readers experienced,” I obviously thought. I had no idea whether people liked the book or not. I myself had never heard of J. Cameron, but after I found out she seemed to be a famous creativity guru who sold books like The artist’s way marvelously well, I was curious to know what kind of writer she was beyond the lines in her autobiography. Her autobiography is worth reading, I thought. By the middle it gets a little boring and I was almost giving up, when many things started to change in her life and uncomfortable feelings about her started to bother me.

No wonder she’s captivating – and I guess that’s why I might’ve suffered a little bit with her as her mental illness became undeniable. I had already found it strange that her characters actually spoke to her when she was writing fiction and she had the urge to write. Actually, for someone who studies psychology, there were many weirdnesses about her, but I tried to ignore them. She was a great writer and she seemed to hold the secret of creativity. Captivating as I said, she convinced me of that. And I was shocked to learn that, sooner or later, serious psychotic episodes did hit her. “Should I keep believing her?,” I wondered with a naive deal of prejudice and fear. “Is the writing process really the way she describes it?”

Well, does it really matter? “We all experience things differently,” I tell myself (and others who are reading this post). After reading Floor Sample and putting some thought on it, I guess I got to extract some lessons for myself from the book, namely dunno feelings. It was by no means an useless book; it had the power of touching me somehow. Cameron’s far from being a bad writer, and even if she was lucky to be married to Scorsese and had many doors open because of that, she has also been a strong person who could be a good mother to her daughter, who fought drugs and alcohol abuse successfully and who could lead a responsive life, no matter what she had to face.

A smile made of plastic and a contagious laughter

I’ve got a friend, let’s call her Nathalie. Nathalie has chosen me as a confidante, because she says that most of the people she knows know themselves, too, so she cannot trust them entirely. In order not to get caught by this web of friends and acquaintances and not feeling ready to face therapy yet, Nathalie has me.

The other day, Nathalie was telling me, with some suffering, how sensitive she is to other people. She is as sensitive to smiles and caring looks as she is to indifference and criticism. Nathalie asks for a workmate to lend her a scissors twice in a row and thinks she has already asked too much. Her workmate doesn’t smile back at Nathalie and my friend starts feeling guilty for having asked for the scissors. Nathalie feels so bad about it that she thinks she should run the market at noon just to buy some chocolates to apologize and at the same time thank her workmate… for the scissors.

“It’s as if I wanted to show her that I wasn’t using her”, Nathalie timidly confesses. “But you just needed the scissors”, I say. “Yes, I really needed the scissors”, she confirms, to admit, in sequence: “But what I really needed was her approval. I was craving for her approval.”

Nathalie carries along her life the fear and the impression that she’s always doing something, anything, wrong. She always needs validation, since she isn’t able to judge herself whether she’s done something right or not.

I hope Nathalie gets better and acquires some more confidence in herself. I hope she can do things right… as right she can. And I hope she finds a way to convince herself that she did her best and that she doesn’t have to please everybody. More than that, I hope Nathalie learns to interpret others’ behaviours more accurately and more functionally, or at least that she can live beyond it. What Nathalie really needs is to say “I am what I am”. It’s impossible to please everybody, and I think Nathalie is ready to begin a new journey when I hear her say: “The more I try to be nice, the more my smile seems false and artificial.”

Nathalie seems to be what we call a loyal friend, but she lacks passion and patience towards other people. Wise and full of personality, she asks: “How do we become a nice, cheerful, well-loved person?” By talking, we realized that Nathalie makes so much effort to please everybody else, that she doesn’t understand or doesn’t accept that others can be different and make less effort than she does. This is where Nathalie becomes selfish, even if she struggles for perfection. Being aware of that, she punishes herself. She feels guilty and avoids the true proximity of others. She can’t really connect to them. I would risk to say that she doesn’t suffer for the lack of proximity, but the lack of approval and recognition, that puts her perfectionism to the test.

Before finishing our enlightening conversation, Nathalie promises herself that she’ll try to put an end to this perfectionism. But she points out that what she really wanted was to get rid of the feeling that something good has to come replace something bad. “Where did I get it from?”, she wonders. I don’t know, my friend. But let’s hurry and find something to replace it. “Something good,” I add. And we laugh, together and sincerely.

Contradictions

I first saw him through his mother. She came with his father, a very quiet man. And she told me to pay special attention to her son, a guy suffering from – yes, one more! – ADD. After a couple of days, I finally met him. A handsome teenager who, after a dozen of words or so, told me, of course, that he suffered from ADD. Time passed and I began wondering why such a friendly and charming young man was only described as having ADD, if he was so much more than that. There seemed to be plenty of adjectives one could use to talk about him, so why look exclusively at the ADD?

By the way, does he really have ADD?

In our second or third meeting, he told me his classmates probably though he was crazy. “Why?” – I asked. He didn’t know what to answer. “What is a crazy person for you?” – I helped him define the situation. He spoke all kinds of things – except those which could describe him. “Do you think you’re crazy?” He didn’t. “Do your friends have any reason to think you’re crazy?” They don’t.

Finding out what to do with his life was the matter. “Choosing always leads me to make the wrong decision,” he wrote. “What is the right decision? When to recognize it?” From his point of view, “when something gathers all of your attention.” Speaking of attention, and having in mind his case of ADD, I questioned him: “Is it possible that something will ever gather all of your attention?” He laughed: “No.”

He also wrote that he’s always wanted to be the favourite (being the favourite means having all the attention – maybe even too much, an amount of attention he will never have towards anything). Other of his beliefs are: “If I studied, I could be the best.” Then, why doesn’t you study? While he doesn’t study, he can keep being a promise and depend on this illusion of success. What if he studies and ends up not being the best? What is, for him, to be the best?

It would also be interesting to note that, specifically when it comes to the choice of a career, he tells: “When I am between two things, a third one always ends up coming to confuse me even more.” And what do their parents think about it? His (quiet) father accepts all his choices… his mother, however, doesn’t want him to study Business (his preferred choice). “She says that based on the example of a cousin of mine who studied that and didn’t succeed.” An invasive mother always thinks she knows everything about her son, as if he was her object, her toy, part of her instead of another individual. Toys can be reduced to tags and can have their destiny traced by us. As for people, they’re much more than that. Much more complicated and less predictable than that.

The TAT

He is 45 years old, works as a doorkeeper and values knowledge enormously. As he couldn’t go on studying, he now studies on his free time, by himself. He reads, makes notes, calculates, using elementary school books and such.

To the first TAT picture (a black and white picture showing a boy looking at a violin), he tells the following story: Old times… a violin… a dilemma. In that generation, they should learn very early… a family of musicians! The boy must be 10 or 11. Not many people dare to earn that early. He wonders how to act, what to play… will he make it? Nowadays, many children have the abilities of an adult. Family had a function. Everything was planned. Nowadays, not all the parents can give that opportunity to their kids. He’s tired, with a lot of things to do. “I have many things to practice”, he thinks, and sticks to this dilemma.

Difficult to know whether he’s talking about him as a kid, or nowadays. But he’s clearly talking about him and the major importance of knowledge in his life. He’s also telling us the impression he has (or once had) that our family determines who (or what) we’ll become. He feels insecure and overcharged towards the environment demands. He’s rather passive and not certain of his capability.

We can never interpret or build a diagnosis like that, based only on one test (worse still, on a tiny part of a test). This little description is not meant to be a diagnosis: it only gives us an idea of how much we can learn of a person from just one picture, one story. By crossing data, we will get to more reliable results.

Rebels without a cause

I love teenagers and I love working with them. They are funny, full of energy and possibilities. There’s always something happening around a teenager. But, from time to time, they leave me disappointed. Teenagers are great when you get to approach them, what is easily done with sincerity. They are great partners to talk, they are nice and loyal to their friends. To the ones who aren’t their friends, however, I often observe a lack of consideration and respect.

Not many teenagers know how to mentally put themselves in the place of others. They complain about their parents, their teachers, their boring classes… not realizing that, by that gesture, they’re not being grateful. Many times, they don’t recognize the effort of others: when something doesn’t please them, they moan, not bothering to pay attention to the intentions behind the actions. Teenagers are not very good at recognizing intentions.

What can we do? They’re growing. They still need to go through some experiences to learn that wasted opportunities come back once or twice but they may not come again a third time (perhaps not even a second). Unfortunately, they need to suffer and to cry even more than they do. They need to suffer for love, they need to have good intentions and frustrations. They need to be frustrated by others to learn that it doesn’t feel good to be frustrated, so we’ve got to be careful not to hurt someone else’s feelings.

They end up learning, the teenagers: some more easily, some not that easily. Resistance, opposition and inconsequence, flags that represent the teen years in our culture, make it seem impossible to be a teenager without being a pain in the ass. But it’s not like that. Being a pain in the ass just for fun can end up becoming a complication in a world that’s not funny at all. As they realize it, they often feel unfit and see no reason to keep going. No wonder that, a rebel without a cause, James Dean, among other examples, committed suicide.

If I could give an advice to a teenager, just one, I’d say: be nice to everybody, not only to the ones who’re nice to – and for – you. But just like I myself am not good at giving advice, teenagers are not good at listening to them. Most of the time they need to be heard, rather than taught.