Okay, so I wrote and published my whole blog yesterday about Depersonalization and Creativity, and how my creativity has been hampered by the illness, but, mulling it over in my mind last night, I realized there were exceptions to that.
What I have taken solace in, from time to time, is photography, using my iPhone mostly.
Taking a few steps backwards from that statement: what some of you may not know is that I used to draw. A lot.
When I was 8-ish, I fell and broke my writing / drawing hand. It wasn’t one break but a few breaks, from memory, so this impacted my writing and drawing. Of course, when I was a kid, they slapped a cast on you and waited for the broken bones to mend, so I didn’t have any physiotherapy that I can remember to help me use my hand again.
Over the years, that hand has grown worse and worse. I have big issues using a normal width pen or pencil, for example, for long periods of time, and the length of the “long periods” is getting shorter the older I get. And the Internet age, where we type mostly instead of hand-writing things, hasn’t helped things either. I can type about 95 words a minute, so that’s a lot quicker and less painful than writing.
So, my first love of drawing — mainly cartooning — ended up dying mostly due to my bad hand.
It wasn’t until the last 20 years or so, with the advent of digital cameras and now cell phones that take pictures, that I started getting into digital photography. I was inquizitive to see how my eye for art and design and all that jazz translated to the realm of the lens, and with the ability to take as many photos as the memory on the card, and later, the storage on the phone, allowed me, combined with the promise to delete the ones I didn’t like or couldn’t use (so I could try, try, try til I got what I wanted), it pushed me to try photography.
I took several photos where quite a few people said, “Wow, that’s a stunning photo.” One of the first ones, which I shared on this blog a few years back, was of an overgrown cottage on an island we visited. The camera wasn’t the best, and I think I’ve lost the original photo now, so the quality isn’t that great, but several people admired it, which encouraged me more.
With Facebook, then Instagram, and the photo filters and adjustments Photoshop and those social media apps offer, good photography hasn’t been easier to create.
This has helped me a great deal with my creativity. I might see something — two colours, textures, a play of light against dark, something — that grabs my attention and I use my camera to make it work. See, there isn’t so much the effort of coming up with an idea, putting it down from my mind into words on a digital notebook, then endlessly revisiting it and tinkering with it until I get it right like there is with my writing; I simply point, click a few photos, see how they turn out, repeat if they aren’t great, move on, then review them later, do a few alterations, and then post them.
It’s more an instant gratification thing more than anything, which works great with the depersonalization. Easy task, little anxiety, bang, it’s done.
So… I have been creative a little while the depersonalization goes away. It’s just not so much in the medium I want to be creative in going forward in my life. But, I have to take the victories where I can get them!
If you want to check out my Instagram, it’s open for public viewing. See more at www.instagram.com/realscottfack/
Beam Me Up, Scotty 
You must be logged in to post a comment.