The author’s bookshelf
Source: © Andrea Rosenhaft
I am tidy and organized. I’ve always been that way. Even as a young girl. I liked my room just so, my bed made, my beloved Bobbsey Twins books in order from one through thirty-six on the shelves above my bed and all the volumes of encyclopedias arranged from A to Z above my desk. I read voraciously to escape a chaotic home dominated by my alcoholic father.
These days, my apartment is full of paintings and objects d’art and antique furniture inherited from my parents and grandparents. Almost every nook and cranny is crammed, and what isn’t filled with chairs with mother-of-pearl inlays and other antiques is filled with bookshelves bursting with books. There are even piles of books on the floor. I like to read physical books and not on devices, although it makes for heavier tote bags. The table in my living room is stacked with books and folders that I need for the memoir I’m currently working on. Call it an orderly chaos.
One study found that “Orderly environments promote convention and healthy choices, which could improve life by helping people follow social norms and boosting well-being. Disorderly environments stimulate creativity, which has widespread importance for culture, business, and the arts.”
I’m a creative person. I post on this blog, write and publish pieces in literary journals and online magazines, and I’m writing a memoir. Yet, as a licensed clinical social worker, I do need to follow particular social norms and expectations.
I much prefer the theory put forth in a Psychology Today post by Michelle McQuaid, for which she interviewed Scott Barry Kaufman of the University of Pennsylvania, a leading author on the creative mind. Kaufman told her, “When you’re being creative you’re blending together different elements and ideas in unusual and unconventional ways. This makes creativity a messy and complex business.”
The author’s wall unit
Source: © Andrea Rosenhaft
The messiness is in the mind, though, and not in a person’s environment. I can be surrounded by organized chaos and pretty much know where everything is but still experience a creative whirlwind in my brain that can and does produce inspiration. Recently I sat at my computer facing a blank screen after completing over 100 pages of my memoir about my time on the long-term psychiatric borderline personality disorder unit. I had emotionally immersed myself in my memories to give the readers a true sense of what life was like on that unit. I was having trouble mentally moving on. Emotions flooded my brain as I wrote some scenes, and I sobbed. I recalled the feeling of community I had on the unit, one place I never felt judged and where I was accepted without reservation. I had shown my new friends the darkest and deepest crevices of my psyche and they hadn’t run screaming in the other direction. Instead, they embraced me. I trembled as I wrote about being out of control and having a code called on me, winding up in four-point restraints.
Mental illness is messy. So is the inspiration that fuels creativity.
McQuaid notes that research by Kaufman and others suggests that when it comes to creativity, less important than the type of emotions you’re experiencing may be the motivational intensity of the emotions you’re experiencing.
Despite no longer meeting the diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder, I still tend to feel my emotions quite intensely. Thanks to the foundations I’ve built with dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) and transference-focused psychotherapy (TFP), I’ve learned how to manage what was once an emotional roller-coaster.
Writing is one of my coping skills; the feeling of creating something from nothing soothes me and I find writing all-encompassing. The fact that I can enter a flow state makes everything else melt away, including a bad mood.
Reading was my escape when I was a child. Writing is my escape as an adult. Words have always kept me sane.
