The Beauty and Pitfalls of Creation and Creativity... How do we creatively thrive?

Elizabeth Gilbert, of Eat, Pray, Love fame, offers her beautiful perspective on how to thrive in a creative life. 

I remember being in my late teens and early twenties when I started to realize that I might actually be an artist. I didn't know something about myself that was plain and obvious to many people around me. And what was equally obvious to those people was that I was a stifled artist. I will eventually get into the reasons for this, however, as I was struggling to reclaim my connection to creativity, I began to confuse that struggle with what creativity actually is. I thought at one point that in order to be creative I had to be dysfunctional. Today, I would argue the exact opposite. If you want to be an artist with longevity, then you better take care of yourself... body, mind, soul, and psyche. There is nothing chic about depression. There is nothing cool about anxiety. There is nothing admirable about suicide. There is nothing to be desired of a manic tendency. These are all very deeply challenging dis-eases that would ideally be loved into balance. 

If this resonates with you at all, I hope you'll take the 20 minutes or so to watch the video. Ms. Gilbert does a beautiful and funny job or reintroducing another way to relate to genius and creativity. It's a safer way for our 'fragile human psyche' to interact with the genius that has come to us to be born.