What Women Know About . . . Passion, Creativity, and feeling the fear

What Women Know About . . .passion! And about feeling the fear . . .
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I’ve been thinking a lot about passion and creativity. Ever since my publisher asked me, “Are you actually mad, or are you just eccentric?” Naturally, I told her I was merely eccentric and she looked very relieved. But now she has me wondering, because I’m not really in the slightest bit eccentric, I’m actually very ordinary. I just said that off the top of my head because it seemed like the most suitable answer and the least likely to alarm her. Which has me thinking about lying. Because we lie all the time in medicine, in business, in politics, in life. We even lie in love. Are you cross with me? my husband asks me on a regular basis, and I lie. Every time. Because the truth – yes, you are driving me mad! – the truth hurts.

It doesn’t hurt the person it’s directed at, because, let’s face it, most people might sulk for five minutes if you’re honest with them – yes your bum does look massive in that – but they get over it and ultimately they thank you for it. The truth hurts oneself. You don’t say in a job interview, “I’m only here because I’m desperate and I’m getting out of this job the minute something better comes up”, because you won’t hurt the feelings of the interview panel, in fact they’ll benefit from your honesty. You’ll hurt yourself by finding yourself on the dole queue.

Self-interest is the main reason people lie. Companies bend the truth about products because they can’t bring themselves to admit defeat. Doctors lie to patients because we can’t bear to admit how useless we feel. Patients lie to doctors – I hardly eat a thing doctor, I’m just big-boned/congenitally enormous/an optical illusion – because they can’t bear the shame of having made themselves ill.

The worst thing about lying isn’t that it’s immoral, it’s that it’s exhausting. We lie because we need to see ourselves as better, more interesting people than we actually are. And yet, so often the reason we can't change into the people we want to be is because we are afraid.

People who don’t have a passion in their lives will often lie about themselves in order to promote self-belief. But people who are being truly creative in their lives – artists, actors, poets, musicians, athletes – and who are passionate about something other than themselves, are much more likely to be happy with the truth. And so I’ve increasingly found myself asking myself, why this is? Why is it that having a creative life, a life where we are following out passions, leaves us at liberty to be more honest with ourselves?

I don’t know how often I’ve met people who’ll say, “I’d love to do X,Y and Z, if only I had the time. . . I’d love to paint if only I had the time . . . I’d love to write if only I had the time.” These are people who then spend a great deal of time doing all sorts of other things. Watching creative people on television doing the things they think they’d like to do, working in jobs they hate to pay for things they don’t need, chauffeuring their children round and round the neighbourhood so that they can be creative instead. I keep meeting women who’ve forgotten how wonderful it is to dance, because they spend hours driving their kids to dance class. Who’ve forgotten how much fun it is to sing or play an instrument, because they’ve spent so much time nagging their kids to practice the piano.

This generation of children, in the Western educated world, will be the most over-protected generation of children in history. So many parents in city suburbs feel that they can’t let their children play unsupervised, take a bus alone, use the Internet without a parent over-seeing it. And this is quite reasonable, because they feel afraid. All of this child-monitoring is time-consuming. And it stifles creativity. We can’t make anything beautiful if all of our energies are being poured into merely observing the creativities of others. And then I also wonder, what this generation will be like when they become adults? What will a generation of adults be like, if they have never been allowed to feel danger, to experience fear, had to fend off bullies?

Everyone feels that it’s important to be honest. We expect honesty from politicians and we rarely get it, so we increasingly view politics with a mixture of apathy, cynicism and contempt. But at the same time, we want leadership. We don’t want to feel like kids, who have to ask permission to use the Internet. We want to feel we have the power to make our own minds up – and yet, we are training our children to do the opposite, all the time.

The problem is that most parents are more strongly motivated by fear, than by desire for truth.

When my daughter was twelve, she entered a drama competition. She was quite good, and was in the running to be in the top three when the adjudicators had added up the marks. But there was one other girl who was spectacular. She stood out miles. She was a wonderful performer, she had amazing stage presence, she was a natural actor. During a break between acts, I got chatting to her mum in the loos – a nurse I knew through work. She and I talked about what our two girls planned to do at university. I told her that the only thing my daughter was excited about at the time was acting. To which she replied, “And are you going to allow her to do that?”

“Of course,” I replied. I was just thrilled that she’d found something she loved to do. The other thing was that I felt that I had come from a generation in which jobs, careers, money, status, permanency and pensions were all our parents cared about, and that had stifled my creativity and made me very unhappy as I'd never felt I could succeed. I’d wished I’d been “allowed” to study something that I’d been passionate about, rather than something that was intended to “lead to a good job.” So, I was pleased to be able to give my daughter that chance. This woman then burst into tears. She admitted that she was just afraid for her daughter. She couldn’t overcome the barrier she felt, when she thought about acting as a profession. It was all about poverty, missed auditions, working as a waitress in between low-paid parts. It was all about failure.

Perhaps this woman was being very realistic. But I felt terribly sad for her. She wanted her daughter to succeed so badly, that she was afraid of her daughter’s talents. Her daughter’s passion wasn’t making her happy – it was making her feel afraid. Her daughter’s wonderful gifts weren’t gifts to her at all – they were disadvantages.

I met this woman many years later – both our daughters are at university now. And my daughter isn’t studying drama at all! But she has a very lovely life. And I do fear she’ll never be financially independent.I fear I'll be supporting her forever! But I don’t ever fear she’ll fail. And the other woman’s daughter is studying medicine now. I often think of her and hope she’s happy. I hope she feels passionate about it too.

I also think she’s probably had to really change.