In The Shadow Of Creativity – The Inherent Costs Of Being An Artist

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In The Shadow Of Creativity – The Inherent Costs Of Being An Artist

6/8/2025

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In The Shadow Of Creativity – The Inherent Costs Of Being An Artist

If you have a passion for the arts and for creativity, then you’ll likely know how difficult it can be to find your voice and your own inner light. So often we begin because we’re inspired by someone or influenced by something, and this initial experience can frame everything we contribute. From these early days which are half for fun and half completely serious, we choose our path and build on the things we know. On one hand, this comes to us for free, the creative energy and the mental frameworks for inventiveness flow like water. The desire is there and it’s within reach. But there is also a cost. A creative path can be a long series of trials that balance out the reward. When we mean business and want to take ourselves seriously as adults with a genuine place in the world, making our creative side compatible with the world so our story makes sense requires a lot of deep inner work as well as personal training.

The most obvious thing we all have to go through is the process of getting extremely good at your skills. When we enter the marketplace, our skills must reach a threshold that far exceeds the average. We are expected to be in the top 5 or 10% to even consider ourselves something as a professional. I once played football with a lower league reserve player. You’d be forgiven for thinking that at that level, the difference wouldn’t be too much. You’d be wrong. Their football skills were far better than anything I’d ever experienced. To become this good, there must be a lengthy process of practice and learning. Imagine you’ve been great at something for years and your reputation is well known, in general circles. Now you must be a beginner again. Being open to this kind of training, when you already sum yourself up as pretty good, takes a dose of humility and an acceptance that good doesn’t mean brilliant. Getting over yourself and building your skills to a level that surpass the norm, without being complacent, means some deep inner work for most of us. This costs us in not only time but in emotional security, temporarily.

Once the process is well under way and you can begin the work of a creative person, you will start to explore the inner world of intangible experience and bring it into the outer world through colour, sound, shape, aroma, taste, texture, and any other form of sense experience. Reflecting the inner world that’s often complex and independent from our external social structures means we need to filter all the elements we find tied in that we decide are not what we want to express. Manifesting the inner world of our imagination and our desire to spread messages means we will experience both shadow and light as we discover what lays within our own psyche. When we work in good conscience and a sense of responsibility, working through this and unpicking the golden thread from the rotten is humbling work. This is us we are exploring and our own flaws and biases we are ironing out. A lot of people find this incredibly difficult.

A lot of common pitfalls in the arts are emotional. Being great at a skill to a level that’s rare and unique, like painting or writing, baking, or building, can mean we become so confident that we assume everyone respects us, likes us, and wants our honest opinion. We can forget that our words and actions have real implications in other people’s lives. Confidence can turn to arrogance which can express as narcissism. Soon, we’re throwing hurtful words around and walking around where we’re not invited, completely oblivious to the harm and distress we’re causing. I think we’ve all met people like that and at some point, as children we probably went through this phase, too. We’re great, aren’t we? Everyone loves me. My emotional and judgemental responses are part of that thing people love. It’s not true. Even if you’re brilliant at something or a lot of things, your personality is still something you control and should be brilliant at too. It’s great to respect yourself for what you’ve achieved and learned, remember that other people just get the face and trousers. The story is yours.

When we have strong feelings about ourselves or others, either good or bad, these can put down motorways of reference that we can’t help but drive down. Ultimately, strong emotions can limit what we create, how we think, and what can be done with what we have. As well as delivering a sense of passion and drive that we require to be effective, when the sensation is negative and the thoughts hurtful to self or someone else, our ability to positively affect the world with our skills is drastically reduced. Cortisol and adrenaline just get in the way of our free-flowing idea machine when they have a miserable backdrop. This means that we end up having to do a lot of inner work to unroot all the negative and hurtful, creativity killing reactions that go on in our mind and biochemistry. It’s not like we can afford a therapist every time, so most of us just make do with the Copilot or some YouTube self-help channel.

On the flipped side of this emotional pitfall is the effect of it happening to others by proxy. If you are particularly good at something, being connected to you can be a source of self-congratulation and personal one-upping that can make people behave differently around you. Relationships can be strained when your perceived aura causes others to act out of character to meet you at where they perceive you. All the while, you’re where you always have been, waiting to be seen for who you really are. This, too, can be difficult to handle and means we have a lot of inner work to do so we can meet this new challenge of having aloof or waspish people around you who think they’re doing the right thing. A calm insistence on the truth without an argumentative tone is the only real way to deal with the self and others, when personal biases and assumptions begin to take the lead.

The world is full of biases that we’ve been exposed to since we were small. A creative life is not immune from this. In fact, it is seriously affected by the general social image that the arts occupy in the civic imagination. The value of a thing and the worth of a thing are typically rated by revenue. For an artist, the worth and value are often rated by response, effect, and inspiration. This gives a sense that artists are wealthy or from a class that has ready money. Most of the arts do not pay well enough to make a living and they require becoming compatible with the side of the world that has money to hand. Prejudices and biases can be a real problem when communicating your passion and occupation, being fast to assume vanity, or not very good, or never going to make it, can become huge obstructions to progress. It can also be hurtful as statements like that imply deep personal flaws or inadequacy. Rather than exclaiming how dare you, which is what some might want to, just smile and move on. It’s not your job to wake every sleeping princess and every frog prince. To combat the general impression that the arts are a waste of time and for people with lots of money, it’s important that you work hard to make your art pay as much as it can. That is if you want to do it as an occupation. Show that it’s a real way of life that works for you and lots of other people, too.

It’s easy to say, difficult to do. Getting hard value from our arts is no easy task. Many an artist have gone mad or given up entirely because their lifetime of sacrifice and effort remains unrewarded on the outside. Ascribing our value according to the perceptions of others is only natural and to work through this, again takes a lot of inner work. Having the stomach to accept your reality of having little to show for mountains of work and effort without complaining is how we find the strength to build on our skills and rediscover our inventiveness. The ghosts of self-loathing and self-doubt can haunt us even in the daytime as complaints and accusations build up against a backdrop of silence and being passed by. Finding the inner strength to be solid and to have enough assertiveness with your emotions to dismiss those thoughts as unhelpful is a necessary lesson and if you’ve not done it before, takes a lot of practice.

Creative people express a level of neurodiversity that means others often misunderstand or judge them for behaving or thinking in novel or unusual ways. Harmless differences are normal however with creative people, their capacity to be inventive means that differences might manifest more often. This can cause social issues in that others are not sure how to respond. Non-creative people or people who rely on set piece social dynamics will struggle to interact because they don’t want to misunderstand or be misunderstood. The opposite can also happen where we draw attention to ourselves as different and therefore a target for personal attack. Some people get a reward for hurting others and creative people often must be able to handle this more than usual.

As our identity and our occupation blur at the edges, an artist can find this even more challenging. The act of delivering aspects of yourself and your imagination to the world as a daily routine means the difference between your life and your work can become hard to distinguish. Putting down a boundary is vital however the passion and drive doesn’t disappear just because you’ve changed the scenario. Thinking about and sometimes worrying about the work side of things is a constant issue that requires mental discipline to establish firm borders. The other aspect of having life, self, and work aligned in such a way is that any rejections we receive have the deep hurt related to personal rejection. It’s a part of our character that is being turned down, and when the people turning it down are close to you then it can be quite painful. There needs to be an inner process of learning to take rejection and accept being turned down by people you respect and like without being personally affected. This is why the boundary between work and life is so important. The narrative that focuses on your occupation and your rewarding work needs to take a back seat otherwise it risks being contradicted regularly. Save it for when you need a boost.

Being true to yourself and expressing genuine inner realities into some kind of creative output and process means accepting the journey. It is humbling at first, as we uncover the gloomy aspects of ourselves and the limitations of our skills. What we find and what we lack are the things that define our work and it’s on both sides of our awareness. Getting our ideas to a point that becomes accessible and compatible with the world at large takes a real effort to work through improvements inside and out. We end up losing elements of ourselves to the process of growing up and learning new psychological mechanisms that bring out the side of us we need and rely on. Becoming the artist who can be independent and fully immersed in their trade means letting go of some of our more childish and imaginary aspects in favour of the hard, cold, and realistic. Creative people have vivid imaginations and often find themselves swamped in narrative that can’t be applied to the real world and original work.

We might have uniforms or costumes, stage names, and manufactured personas, but when we express our creative skill in the world, we are exposing a part of ourselves that makes us vulnerable and open. To truly serve by bringing out our own inner truths and perspectives, our unique creative ideas, the pathway from mind to the world must be clear. By putting up blocks and twists and turns the thoughts get caught up, mistranslated, and contaminated with whatever else is going on. Through the medium of your art, the reality of your inner world is brought into the outer world by keeping the doorway clear. Finding this skill means learning to straighten the mind and quieten the thoughts so that the outward expression is given the space to thrive. It is hard and as we examine the narrative we allow, it often becomes clear that it’s biased and full of emotive inconsistency. Cutting it out is how we purify our creativity and make it as effective as possible.

As you discover the kinds of things that present in your own thinking that do not align with your conscience and the ideal you want to reach for, others will mirror their own shadows in the face of your light. As a creative person, your new and interesting ideas are like reg flags to some people who insist on conformity and sameness. They can be haughty and judgemental, hurtful and demeaning, when you attempt to deviate from the norm in even the smallest way. Finding it in yourself to be confident and secure even when people who you may respect undermine your foundations, the confidence in your direction must be deeper than their shovels. Appreciating that people can be wrong about you and have their own defence mechanisms when made uncomfortable, it becomes easier to understand when you feel personally slighted by words.

It is your responsibility to accept the truth about who you are and what your passions are. As we delve into our own inner world, there will be thoughts and feelings that come forward that do not represent who we are, hurts and traumas, funny biases, cruel ones, things that keep us safe from looking at ourselves in painful ways, and these all come apart like the skin of an onion. The soul of the individual is different, you owe it to yourself to complete who you are by working on your attributes, being honest about your passion and talents, and working to serve the world with what you’re given. This service mentality helps us to stay grounded when we hit rock bottom and the heights of success. We lose some of the pleasure of creating, the childish fun no longer serves us. The playful element gets in the way. Creating for the real world means we make real world experience that not only appeals to others but offers us a sense of artistic reward. As we build our character to become the people we need to be to make a success of it, we lose parts of ourselves that no longer serve us and that stand in the way of our progress. Other people might identify these parts of us with who we really are and they may not like the new version of us. We need to remember that this is for us and our family, not for people who like the younger version of you.

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