How Living with a Chronic Illness Boosts My Creativity

When you live with a chronic illness, it’s easy to doubt your purpose. When I wake up each morning, the first thing I do is try to feel what hurts and how much. Then I determine what kind of day it might be: how long I’ll need to “ease in” to my day; how much non-sedentary activity I might be up for; and whether I will need an afternoon nap. Then I have to reconcile those parameters with whatever appointments or commitments I have. And then I get to figure out which of my creative projects I might get to work on.

Notice how many “mights” I used. That’s because, after all that thinking and planning, my body might throw me some curve balls. A random headache or stomach ache that takes me down. Pain in a new place, or more severe than usual. Suddenly not being able to eat anything for various reasons. It could be anything, really. Regardless, I have to figure it out. It’s my body, and I can’t just leave it behind. I don’t have a choice.

When you deal with this kind of thing day after day, it becomes all-consuming, and at some point you look. at yourself in the mirror and think, What am I even doing? What is the point of all this?

And that’s when I’m incredibly grateful to be a Creative, a writer in particular. Because, you know what activity is always sedentary? Writing. And you know what activity is amazing — essential, even — for good therapy? Writing. And you know what activity allows you to express all that anger and sadness and fear and all those other scary emotions, without anyone else knowing, without hurting anyone else, and without doing anything illegal? You guessed it: writing.

Whatever I feel, I can just write it. There’s no one to worry about burdening or complaining or trying to fix my problems. No one is judging how I deal with things or what I’m thinking. I don’t even have to be careful about the way I say things. I can just write. Create. Bring myself some peace and equilibrium without “bothering” anyone else. And because writing is magical (see this post) and helps us discover what we want to say, sometimes I can learn things about myself and the world around me. And all of that helps me deal with my illness, while at the same time feeding the fire of my creativity.

I’ve been on medical leave from my teaching job for the past 6 months, thanks to a rare, obscure, chronic illness called Interstitial Lung Disease (ILD) (go ahead, Google it — you know you want to). And while I’ve certainly had many difficult days, one huge gift that has come out of this sequester is The Gift of Time. The more time I’ve had to myself, the more the world around me quiets down, and the more room in my head I have for creative thoughts. And we all know that creativity breeds creativity, so in the past six months, my brain has gone wild!

Don’t get me wrong: I am not one of those people who always finds the unicorn in a forest of horses with horns. But I’m not Eeyore, either. And this unicorn was too big to miss. So, here are some ways living with a chronic illness has catapulted my creativity:

1. A New Way to Discover Truths About Myself (through fiction): living with chronic illness requires introspection; for me, that means therapy. One of the main ways therapists ask you to explore your feelings is through writing about them. I was surprised to find that writing about my thoughts and experiences in the first person was difficult for me. Because of that, I shifted to writing about myself in the third person; I did this without even thinking about it, or even stopping to consider what was going on in my head just then. Third person just seemed like the most organic way to talk about myself. Maybe it provided just enough disconnection from my mind and body that I was able to “get outside” my feelings and better identify and explore them? I’m not sure. But I write fiction, right? So, why not? I started writing about myself as if I were a character, referring to myself as, simply, “she.” I sometimes mention others’ names, but often I’m referring to them by their simple pronouns as well. I also stopped worrying about whether what I was writing was “true” or not: turns out, it doesn’t really matter. It’s going to be true by virtue of it coming from my own heart and head. That’s part of the magic of fiction. Somehow this practice makes it easier for me to feel the experiences. Names seem to complicate things — like I’m having to bushwhack my way through the jungle rather than having a trail to follow. After awhile, I started writing my character studies in this way, too. Character studies are drafts where I flesh out characters for my stories by asking them questions and then taking notes on what they say. I used to create names for the characters for this exercise, and often I would use those names in the future drafts. But I’ve found that writing in the third person with pronouns only helps me get to know them better because I don’t have the extra baggage of the meaning of the name there. So, this 3rd-person exercise meant to jumpstart my reflections on living with ILD not only accomplished that, but it also expanded my capacity to understand and deepen my fictional characters.
2. Slowing Down: ILD forces me to slowwwwww dowwwwnnn. I have to walk more slowly, take breaks more frequently during the day, reduce the number of activities I do. For certain, more strenuous activities, I can only do them for so long before I have to stop. Like, literally, my body will shut down and stop moving. It forces me to be more intentional and deliberate about my choices. I’ve had to learn to be honest with myself about what I will and will not be able to handle, about my true strengths and weaknesses. I’m learning to actually listen to my body. Imagine that. I used to hyperfocus, completely ignore my body’s cues, and “power through” any pain or discomfort until I reached the “finish line,” whatever that meant and whatever that took. Power Through was pretty much my mantra for life. Now, admittedly, sometimes situations call for a little grit and powering through. But believe me when I say that hyperfocusing for eight hours with no regard for any other human needs might allow you to “finish” your project or produce more, but it will not improve the quality of your work. It will not open your mind further, help you “get more ideas,” give you more time to execute things “perfectly,” or any of those other lies you tell yourself when you’re on your seventh hour and you’re actually crying from exhaustion as you type or draw. Because of ILD, I have to schedule my activities in hour-long blocks at most. That forces me to slow down, be intentional, and focus on detail, but I can go all in because I know there’s an end point. I time myself, and I stop when the timer goes off. Then I move on to another activity (and I don’t let myself cheat and set the timer for another block of the same activity). This gives my brain a break from the type of thinking I was doing. I try to alternate writing with visual art or music for better well-roundedness. I do allow myself to go back to activities later once I’ve cycled through a few different ones. This kind of structure helps me immensely in slowing down — I know I’m not going to finish a whole novel (or even a chapter) in an hour, so I don’t even worry about it. Instead, I choose a focus: if it’s a first draft, I’m just writing as much as I can without stopping to edit or revise; if it’s a piece of digital art, I’m focusing on one part of the process; etc. The hour-block structure also allows for more flexibility for things that might come up, health-wise or creatively. Sometimes a writing session will spark a new idea for a different project, and then I have time I brainstorm or work on it without having to interrupt my writing. Either way, the Big Benefit of slowing down when it comes to creativity is processing time. In my experience, if you can put a couple days, or even hours, between a draft and a second look, you’re giving yourself the gift of perspective; that doesn’t happen organically any other way. Then you just have to train yourself not to delete or trash everything you’ve done because, on second thought, after some time away and consideration, you abhor it. Good luck with that.
3. Expecting the Unexpected: I’m guessing at some point in your life, someone has given you this very deep, very poignant piece of advice: expect the unexpected. And you were probably fairly young and blown away at the time, and you nodded your head and said, Ohhhhh…yeah…true, when they expounded upon it. But have you really ever expected the unexpected? Do you even know what that means? Until ILD, I had not, and I did not. But no one understands that cliche better than someone living with a chronic illness. As I’ve mentioned, there are certain things you can absolutely expect. For example, I can expect to have trouble breathing sometimes; or to have difficulty at high altitudes. But the majority of things I deal with on a daily basis are unpredictable, have unknown causes, and have no real effective treatments: various sleep troubles, frequent but random nausea, fibromyalgia as a “side effect,” etc. The list goes on. Now, I realize this seems super negative and dark, but oddly, my brain went another way with it. My brain, also a trauma brain, was like, well, if I can’t really predict these things or know what to expect, then I might as well just do what they tell me, go on living as best I can, and keep my mind open to the possibility (or probability) that anything can happen. That way I’ll never truly be shocked and I can learn to be adaptable. Basically, it worked. Flexibility and adaptability are two of my best qualities. They’re the foundation of what makes me an excellent problem solver and out-of-the-box thinker. And those qualities are what lead me to creative endeavors. Here’s where I think ILD and creativity are in a cooperative relationship. Did I become flexible and adaptable because of dealing with ILD? No — I’ve been that way for most of my life. But…because I had those skills already, I was able to adopt that open-to-everything mindset about ILD, which allowed me to truly experience what it means to expect the unexpected, which then enhanced my flexibility and [especially] my adaptability, which opened up the box I already think outside of, and — BOOM! — my creativity exploded! Since I’ve been home on medical leave, I can barely keep up. I am writing, drawing, creating graphic art, playing music, and taking pictures daily, not to mention spending time each day brainstorming ideas so I won’t forget them. This has been by far the most creatively fertile period of my life, and I just turned 50! And thanks to ILD, I have the time, without pesky responsibilities like a job, to sit down, slow down, and actually do the things!