Notable: Creativity & The Age Bias—Yours, Mine & Ours
Plus, a free download of the introduction to Blissful Thinking, my forthcoming book.
Recently I came across a piece in Time magazine titled “What Johnny Depp Has Become.” The first line was a real blood boiler: “The aging process is kind to no one, and that includes Johnny Depp.”
Irksomely, Depp’s substance use gets only the glancing mention that, of late, the actor has been “guzzling expensive wine (reportedly more than $30,000 worth each month).” That’s it. Then we’re back to the horror of “the creeping jowlishness, the deepening frown lines, and other physical indignities that come with getting older.”
Is it in poor taste to comment on… what? The obvious? His very public career started in 1984. The only thing more obvious than the fact that he’s not a member of Gen Z is that he’s spent that life smoking cigarettes, drinking hard, and consuming drugs.
Maybe it’s Depp’s ability to win defamation trials?
Certainly, the actor’s most recent legal imbroglio was a testament to his own delusions. We heard the messy excerpts. Then we heard Depp scoff at the idea he abused substances. "It was essentially just self-medication," he said. "Where what you want to escape from is your own brain, your own head."
If I was going to describe substance abuse, I couldn’t think of a better way to way do it.
The aging process is kind to no one, and that includes Johnny Depp.
I get the unwillingness to admit you’re a substance abuser.
Around the time Depp rose to national attention in 21 Jump Street, I was bottoming out. Before my leap into rehab, living sober had the appeal of a cold cup of sick. But I couldn’t keep a job, stay in college, or stay out of mental institutions. I saw my life as heading in one of two directions—I could either get sober, or spend it drooling in a corner thanks to alcoholic wet brain.
Had I been achieving fame and fortune while getting wasted, I’m not sure I’d have made the same choice. And Depp isn’t the only example that’s led me to question this. I’ve always been baffled by people who quit drinking and drugging while holding jobs or intimate relationships. Substances were my full-time job, my lover, and my primary decision maker.
And that’s when I see the link.
For all of us, moments of grace appear that make way for something new. There is no “reason” that explains how we respond to that moment. The days and months and years that follow are another matter. Less chance than commitment and hard work.
At this point of course, I’m talking not only about substance abuse recovery, but the nurturing of our creative spark. Ideas come in moments of grace, and I want to be no less awed and changed by them than I was the decision to get sober.
Back in 2016, I heard Krista Tippett interview Elizabeth Gilbert. In all that time, what’s stuck with me was Gilbert’s assertion that ideas are conscious and living. They have a will to be made, she said, and they spin through the cosmos, looking for human collaborators.
When I heard that, I understood that grace works the same way. Viewing my creative urges as moments of grace has made all the difference. It encourages reverence, defeats imposter syndrome, and allows for mystery.
Listening to the podcast again, I heard a part I’d forgotten, where Gilbert says she lost an idea to Ann Patchett. I don’t know about that—I believe more strongly in the zeitgeist, the will to come into being and the collective subconscious—but I subscribe to her main point. That we must choose curiosity over fear. (It’s a delightful episode.)
This is the essence of nurturing our creative lives over the long haul and into the dotage. Remaining curious.
Will curiosity get you into trouble and make life more difficult?
Probably.
But when I find myself yearning for safety, smallness, sameness, I remember the wisdom of Pema Chödrön. “You become touchier, more fearful, more irritable than ever,” she writes. “The more you just try to get it your way, the less you feel at home.”
Her remedy isn’t to become fearless, but to learn the nature of our fears.
If we see our so-called limitations with clarity, precision, gentleness, goodheartedness, and kindness and, having seen them fully, then let go, open further, we begin to find that our world is more vast and more refreshing and fascinating than we had realized before. In other words, the key to feeling more whole and less shut off and shut down is to be able to see clearly who we are and what we’re doing.
Pema Chödrön
To live fully is to live with the vulnerability of openness. If I didn’t embrace this, I wouldn’t have moved to New York City, written a memoir, or begun teaching yoga at 40. But living fully also means making mistakes. If I didn’t hold what I learned with friendly curiosity, I wouldn’t still be an on-air live television host, or met my now-husband, or written a second memoir.
If Elizabeth Gilbert sat down to write that story, a book would still be there. It just wouldn’t be the same as the book she originally envisioned. Certainly, her version would be different from Patchett’s. I also think that not lamenting the real culprit in Depp’s life serves only to fuel our collective fear of the dotage.
My memoir is out Sept 26!
Blissful Thinking, my book about the years I spent chasing wellness across the globe and getting sicker, is out in September.
Would you like a sneak peek? Grab a free download of the introduction here (it asks for an email, but don’t worry, you won’t be subscribed to this newsletter twice). Or here’s the trailer.
Ready to commit?
Here’s a preorder link for signed copies, or the ebook. And yes, there will be an audiobook!
If you do preorder, I’ll be giving a creativity masterclass on September 25 exclusively for people who preorder. Let me know you got the book with this form and you’re in.
Until next time…
