Creativity + mental health

In first grade I had my first proper panic attack.

My parents were on vacation when it happened. I was in Mrs. Baker’s class at John Marshall Elementary in Scranton, PA, when something strange started to happen.

I started to get a repeating image in my head that I couldn’t shake…

I would see the school nurse knock on my classroom door, and quietly ask for me to step out into the hallway with her. There she would inform me that my Mom had cancer, and that she was dying.

Now, let me be clear, my Mom did not have cancer, nor did she even have any symptoms.

Nonetheless, this thought protruded into my head entirely uninvited and without reason, and the more I tried to push it out, the more it fought its way in.

It’s a frightening thing to have your mind turn against you in first grade.

And because it took place entirely inside my mind, I had no where to run and no way to fight.

So I stood up from my desk and shouted that I needed to go to home.

I remember my aunt picking me up early from school and asking me what exactly was wrong so she could explain it to my Mom…

“I don’t know” I responded, looking out the backseat window, “…but I think it’ll be gone by my birthday….”

23 years later….. IT AIN’T GONE.

Looking back, it’s easy to see that I was suffering my first bout of intrusive thoughts, a core symptom of what I’d soon discover would shape the rest of my childhood and early adulthood.

Despite what many people think, OCD (or obsessive-compulsive disorder) has nothing to do with liking your pencils arranged in a neat line, or obsessing over a crooked picture frame.

Rather, it’s a vicious and often debilitating mental illness that deals primarily with intrusive thoughts (the obsession), and a corresponding ritual to ease them (the compulsion).

It often starts innocently enough (counting your steps, flipping light switches), but continues to evolve until it’s created a full-on battleground that takes place entirely in your own mind.

An easy way to understand this is through the pink-elephant test.

Here’s how it works:

• Set a 30 second timer on your phone

• As soon as you hit “start”, do everything you can to NOT think of a pink elephant until the timer expires.

How’d you do?

Not only did you probably immediately think of a pink elephant, but you probably found that the harder you tried to push it out, the more the pink elephant came barreling back into your head, right?

(If you’re one of the 1% of people who didn’t struggle with this exercise, congratulations, you win at life.)

Now, replace the cute pink elephant with something far more sinister (violent imagery, irrational fears, existential questions), and you now have a glimpse into life with OCD.

At its core, OCD is an intolerance for uncertainty.

No doubt, as a little kid with my parents on vacation, I was worried about their safety which manifested in my irrational fear of my Mom being diagnosed with cancer.

Instead of shuddering at the thought and moving on like most people, someone with OCD grips that thought and analyzes it furiously until they can safely understand why it popped in their head in the first place.

Often times, this process repeats until the person engages in some sort of compulsion to quell the thought. This can be a prayer, a ritual, a movement, anything.

For me, it started with a phrase. “No bad thoughts.”

I used to say this phrase to my Mom, quite literally, around 100 times a day, and I’d only relax when she’d repeat it back to me.

If my Mom was away (which she rarely was), my Dad or my brother would step in as my “no bad thoughts” dancing partner.

And it worked, for a little.

But here’s the cruel trick with OCD…

Compulsions are like a drug… at first you get relief when you first using them.

But over time, the compulsion becomes less and less effective at quelling the intrusive thoughts, forcing you to rapidly increase the frequency of the compulsion, lest ye suffer through the obsession completely unguarded.

“No bad thoughts” went from a phrase I uttered once every 30 minutes, to, in certain cases, one I was forced to say multiple times a minute…

Even if I was mid-conversation with my friends, or in the middle of a sporting event, the obsession would become so strong, and the compulsion so tempting, that nothing would stand in the way.

Around high school, my creepy little OCD began to infect my religious beliefs.

Now, instead of obsessing about my family getting sick or hurt, I was spending 90% of my day obsessing that I was going to Hell for something that I said or did.

It could be as little as a white lie, but it would trigger a vicious explosion of compulsory prayers until I felt like I had been saved.

In my mind, my compulsions carried the weight of God and determined me and my family’s fate in the afterlife.

It was an incredibly horrifying way to live life, and it stayed with me throughout high school and into college.

I remember walking down the hallways of my high school, stopping every few feet to bow my head in prayer, hoping that no one would notice, but simultaneously worrying that if I hid my compulsion, that I would be denying God in front of my friends and damned for eternity (scary).

Year after year, like a cruel game of whack-a-mole, I’d work on a solution for my obsessions, only to watch that solution turn into my next compulsion.

Family, religion, relationships, were all fertile ground for my OCD since they were easy ways to emotionally control me.

I genuinely mean it from the bottom of my heart when I say I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

It was (and is) a mental prison, and barely anyone (except my close friends and family) knew it was happening because it took place entirely in my own head.

Now… how I dealt with my OCD isn’t the point of this post. It’s not the point of this Substack either.

The reason I shared this story is because it’s remarkably un-special.

In fact, it’s far more common than anyone admits… especially amongst creatives.

Maybe OCD is foreign to you, maybe it’s not.

Maybe your flavor of mental burden is ADHD… or ADD… or autism.

I speak with dozens of artists every week, and it usually takes a few conversations before everyone opens up about some sort of “mental health challenges”.

Which begs the question…

If everyone is mentally ill, then maybe it’s time to re-define what that actually means.

And the more I look into it, the more I see mental health challenges as the yang to the yin of creativity.

You don’t get one without the other… and trying to rip them apart is like trying to separate the sky from the stars (which I have yet to figure out how to do).

Instead… it seems much more fruitful to find ways to achieve balance between these two parts of myself.

Because of my OCD, I know I’m able to think super critically about problems, which is why it’s also important for me to find ways to balance that out with periods of mindfulness and rest.

Now of course, the OCD part of my brain will convince me I don’t need mindfulness or rest, which is exactly why I need to practice it, lest I become consumed by the yang.

Is this actually making sense?

My point is…. many artists (and creatives in general), tend to view their “mental challenges” as an obstacle on their journey towards a creative life.

I’m here to tell you that it’s not an obstacle, but an inevitable counterweight.

The more your creativity expands, so too does your mind’s ability to explore the darker parts of the human experience. It is only natural.

It’s the FEAR of that counterweight that becomes the obstacle.

My OCD has never once stopped me from doing anything in my life, only the fear of it has.

And whatever challenges you face aren’t actually stopping you from doing anything.

It’s the fear of those challenges that is.

So stop using whatever you’ve been diagnosed with (officially or via WebMD) as a reason to not move forward with your life.

Cause I hate to spoil it for you…. but it aint gonna be gone by your next birthday 🤭

God speed my mentally ill friend,

🫡⚔️

Michael from MAD Records