Navigating the Creative Crash

I am going to put this out there and see if anyone who reads my blog has experienced this before.

You just finish some sort of creative pursuit – a drawing, writing, whatever. The point is that you have completed something new, and likely something that took a lot of time. Your pour a lot of energy into creation. You also pour emotional energy into posting it. You’ve worked hard on it, after all. You want to share what you’ve created and want to see what the reaction is.

So, you post your work. You don’t expect anything immediate to come from it, as that would come off as feeling entitled. But you’re still feeling a little… disappointed? Maybe it isn’t really disappointment, but you are feeling down. The feeling persists. It gets worse when there seems to be no activity related to the thing you poured your time into.

You start to wonder why you do this to yourself if you feel this way every time you post.

This is the Creative Crash.

Understanding the Creative Crash

The Creative Crash is something I’ve experienced near constantly in my life since I started posting my creative output on the internet. It is where the rush and elation of creativity smacks into a wall of seeming indifference and into a wasteland of obscurity. You find yourself lost, asking “is this it?”

The lack of reward causes you to question if your effort – your creativity – is even worth it.

Of course, I use the word “reward” in a very generalized sense. The reality is that you are not owed anything; millions of people post their work into the continual churn of what algorithms have indelicately framed as “content” and the competition makes it hard to stand out.

But, still? Nothing for your efforts?

Where does the Creative Crash come from?

The Creative Crash is not strictly internet-based phenomena, but the internet has certainly exacerbated the issue. Because of the near instantaneous flood of information blasted into your face from a computer or smartphone at any given second, our expectations of how processes work have increased exponentially. If a hashtag can sweep the internet within hours, if memes can cycle into our lives within a day, if we can get continuous updates to news stories we are tracking, down to the minute, why can’t acknowledgement for our effort come at the speed of data?

So, while the Creative Crash is not sole cause, it is like gas poured on the fire.

Now, with that said, I took psychology and sociology in community college. I am not an expert by any means. All I can do is speak from my perspective, what I recognize, and what I have directly observed regarding this Creative Crash. As I see it, the Creative Crash is the relationship between three things:

1. Self-esteem
2. Comparison
3. Isolation

None of these three things are specifically related to the internet, but I don’t think it is hard to see how modern “content” culture can warp these things terribly in how we view ourselves and out work. These things already exist in meatspace, but digital spaces just make them feel so much more real than reality itself.

Self-esteem

For me, self-esteem and creation are heavily linked. I feel that is a thing that many creatives experience, no matter their craft. You put enough time and effort into something it inevitably because part of how you view yourself. That’s why when you make public something you’ve been pouring so much energy into the weight of people not flocking to it can feel unbearable.

Now, imagine that you are a raindrop splashing town into a river. You may be a particularly unique and cool raindrop, but so are all the other raindrops that are now finding their way into the churn. That churn is unending and torrential – this is the internet. You and your creations are a drop in a river of continuous content, competing against other raindrops and corporate pipelines flushing their water into the river.

It doesn’t mean you aren’t a great raindrop, but you’re still just a raindrop in a rushing river.

It can be hard to deal with, but can explain why luck is so influential. And no, you cannot control luck. It doesn’t do anything about the self-esteem issue, but at least you know a lot of this is out of your hands. Or bubble? I admit this metaphor isn’t the best, but you probably get it, right?

Comparison

The human mind recognizes patterns easily. it’s why I could show you a picture of an electrical outlet and you can see a face… unless you’re in some European country where your sockets don’t look like faces. Anyway, the point is we cannot help but observe and compare.

Just like we were a raindrop amongst other raindrops, sometimes we observes deep similarities between ourselves, our creations, and people in similar circumstances. At times, it may seem like they’re doing better than you are at the same game. And yeah, that can be largely true. It could also just been “grass-is-greener-sour-grapes” and that’s perfectly okay to feel.

But if you let it eat at you, and dwell upon it, it only makes things worse. Celebrate the success of others and do not begrudge them. It’s much worse to get caught up in the comparison to the point it paralyzes you. I’m no stranger to seeing peers surpass me. It’s the way of the world. I will allow some time to feel envy, but then I have to shut that shit down or else I’ll go nowhere.

Isolation

Creativity, as often as we try to make it social, is often a lonely pursuit. Even when working with others, I can’t imagine someone not being in their own head about their part in it and overthinking things.

I have been inside my own head plenty of times. it’s a repellant place.

No matter what, you’re going to invest significant time all on your lonesome of the things you love and the things you create. It’ll be a lot of time spent obsessing over details and how you think those details will go over. When it comes time to socialize and it feels like you’re getting nothing, it just ends up making you feel lonelier, I imagine. At least that is how it has been for me.

You put way too much emphasis on how you are viewed (or the lack of viewing) and it just drives you to further isolation. This results in a feedback loop where you create, obsess, dwell, reach out, and then panic when you find yourself back at the top of the cycle. Only to do it all over again.

It’s brutal, isn’t it?

Navigating the Creative Crash

So, with these elements in mind, how do we actually get to the premise of this whole damn blog post about navigating the Creative Crash?

I’ll begin this section with a bait and switch. I honestly don’t know how to navigate the anxiety that comes with the Creative Crash. I have been trying things that help sometimes. I’ve also tried things that don’t really help. I am very much on a journey of discovery in trying to understand what I am dealing with when I am confronted from the come down of exhilarating “making” and dispiriting “sharing.”

With that said, this is all very much about what I do. I don’t know if any of this will work for anyone else. Probably a lot of what I am writing about could be better handled through therapy or something, but in the meantime, I can find other ways to regulate. And regulate I do – the Creative Crash intensifies with increasing post activity, so I need to navigate these issues a lot.

Strategies I have employed to varying degrees of success include:

Disabling Comments

An empty comment field is a hole of sadness to someone like me. Realistically, for some media, disabling the comments is just hurting yourself. The hope is eventually someone will respond, share, or encourage what you do. However, sometimes posting projects with no comment fields can make me feel a little safer; I no longer tie the material to empty spaces. This tends to be a temporary thing for me – it depends on my mood.

Avoiding Stats

I am not very good at this, but I am trying. On a good day I can avoid looking at stats for the entire day. Most days I find myself checking almost hourly. It’s a sickness I can’t help beyond just putting limitations on myself.

So much of a person’s perceived worth in society is inevitably mathematized and the healthiest thing is knowing when to ignore the figures.

Taking in Comforting Media

Taking time to not work – to watch a show, read a book, listen to a song – really does have a significant effect on mental health.

Ideally my advise would go beyond “consume” things, but I am being honest. I do take walks, but more often than not, it’s enjoying something I like. Maybe not even a specific thing, but similar enough to other things I like because I can learn from them. Speaking of learning…

Learning a Skill

I just like taking time to try new things or learn something new. I have found that sometimes to put my mind right during a Creative Crash is to just pickup something to learn about or practice. But, I am just not sure if this is burying frustrations under a pile of new information. But I do feel a bit better when I have something else to really think about. That’s what half of my favorite YouTube channels tend to be about.

Napping

I find that I sleep a lot of more lately when I can get away with it. Part of it is regulation after a long day, either when I go to bed at night, or when I take a quick nap when I am home for work. Other times, for sure, especially when I am feeling bad, it becomes a safe space to disconnect and do nothing. A dark room, a pillow, and a blanket can put me at ease as I crash out.

Working Again

By far my least healthy coping strategy is to just get back to work, displacing the anxiety of the Creative Crash into anxious drawing or writing that masks the feelings of inadequacy in the guise of being a hard worker. Usually the work won’t be nearly as good as I calm down and work to polish it, but it’s something and it is distracting.

Getting back into work, much like the other strategies, are not really great suggestions. They’re really more about how I react to the discomfort of a Creative Crash and they work in various degrees at various times. And the truth is, sometimes none of them work. I am always looking for something else to try though, which brings me to my last point.

One thing I have been working on that I will share is something I hope will help me deal with the Creative Crash is still very much a work-in-progress.

Crash-Recovery

Lately I have been trying to turn this stuff around by putting attention on the works of friends. Part of the nature of a Creative Crash, to me, is that it is universal. I don’t think I am the only one dealing with this weird and unpleasant aspect of creative work on the internet. I think a lot of discourse surrounding it gets washed away by feelings of wanting not to be “cringe” online. Expressing a modicum of discomfort at stuff like this can be construed as whining, or even in bad taste because there is so much worse stuff going on out there. Positive vibes only.

Yet, we also hear continual discourse about prioritizing mental health and cultivating honesty and a healthier lifestyle. So we want people to speak up on mental health, but not if it is a small, uncomfortable thing, because there are more important things going on. The contradiction is quite obvious.

But again, I don’t want to sound like a broken record, complaining, either. It’s a difficulty thing to balance. That’s why I try to forgo the discussion and just apply what I feel to helping other people not feel the same frustrations I do. I try to lessen possible Creative Crashes when I can.

I’ll haunt my social media accounts for things people have posted and I’ll drop in and leave an encouraging comment or some thoughts and what they’ve done. Same with my peers who work just as hard, if not harder than I do. I’ll drop comments, contact them, whatever form of acknowledgement I can find. Someone is reading, someone is acknowledging their work.

It’s not much, but I am sure it does help.

As for you?

This is where I turn this whole post around and put the question to you. How do you navigate the Creative Crash? If you don’t face this, I envy you, and wish you to share your secrets – unless it is just good mental health, if so, keep it to yourself. We can’t all be so lucky.

For real, though. please drop a comment or check out some of my fiction.