Of Doubt, Belief, and the Creative Process

“Some like to understand what they believe in. Others like to believe in what they understand.” — Stanisław Jerzy Lec

Over the past few months, I have experienced a rather abrupt departure from my usual pattern of writing. While I willingly admit to being a bit lax with the frequency of my posts (on both Medium and the other forums that I frequent), I have tried hard, and usually succeeded, at sticking to my quota of an article every fortnight.

But the past few months have been different. My writing pace has slowed down, almost to an alarming extent. Even now I struggle to put these words down, a challenge I had strongly believed to have overcome many years ago.

I try telling myself that I have reasons. A new job, new surroundings, the pressures of meeting personal and professional commitments. . . I’m simply being overwhelmed by what we like to call “life”.

Except that deep down, I know that’s not the truth. As busy as my schedule is, it’s nothing compared to how busy I used to be, and I still made time to write then. Truthfully, my daily activities have nothing to do with this writer’s block I’ve been experiencing.

I’m just going through a period of self-doubt.

We’ve all been there. Anyone who has ever attempted to create something in their lives, original or otherwise, is familiar with this feeling. . . this sensation of being suffocated, almost being drowned out by your own insecurities. Even when everything seems to be going well, even when you seem well on the path to achieving your goals, out of nowhere comes this irritating little voice in your head that seems to be hell-bent on screwing everything up.

Maybe, it says, that you’re not doing as well as you think you are. Maybe, it suggests, that all your efforts are in vain, that you should stop trying altogether. It pokes at your scars, prods at your thoughts, brings forth long-buried memories that were best forgotten; it compares you to others and constantly highlights your own shortcomings. It makes you stumble on your chosen road, forces you to pause your pen mid-sentence, encourages you to throw out those unfinished drafts and discard those long-winded ideas.

Sure, you try and fight this in the beginning. This is just a phase, you tell yourself. Everyone goes through this at some point or the other. Overcoming such hurdles is the first step to success. Isn’t that what all those inspirational articles and pithy Facebook quotes are all about?

But at a certain point this becomes exhausting. Day after day, getting up in the morning and slogging through your life’s work, your “passion”, and having to rely on self-affirmations just to survive takes its toll on the mind. Eventually you realize that it’s easier to just go back to being a mindless consumer, to give up on all this work and take life as it comes.

After all, if you can’t bring yourself to give a shit about your work, why would anyone else bother?

I too was consumed by such thoughts not until a month ago. So before my mind was completely overwhelmed by despondency, I decided to take a trip to the local British Library. It was the place where my love affair with books and literature began, and I hoped that I would be able to find something that would give me the shot in the arm my romance so desperately needed.

It was here that I found a catalog of articles, named A Certain World: A Commonplace Book by the poet W.H. Auden. It was a motley collection of works by the authors favorite writers and his own musings. The part that caught my attention was the writer’s take on the topics of belief, doubt, and certainty.

Auden writes:

It is true, as Pascal says, that “to believe, to doubt, and to deny well are to the man what the race is to the horse,” but only in that order. We must believe before we can doubt, and doubt before we can deny. And … we all do begin by believing what we are told.

I found this statement rather intriguing, since the writer claims that doubt is not so much as the opposite of belief, but rather a step in a process. Certainly he says this in the context of one’s beliefs about various subjects, but I wonder whether the idea can be applied to self-belief as well.

After all, isn’t that almost typical of the creative process? All creative works start off with a strong belief in one’s talent, one’s skill. . . a belief that usually originates from external validation. Simply put, we hear so many people tell us that we’re good at something that we’re convinced that we’ve got a real talent for it. We honestly believe, in our hubris, that that was something we were born to do.

But eventually reality kicks in. We take a large step into our chosen field, and suddenly the world isn’t the same anymore. Everywhere there is competition, people doing the same thing you’re doing, but so much better and with such lesser effort. Doubt begins to creep into the mind, and we start to wonder if we’re honestly as good as we think we are; or worse, if we ever were.

Then comes denial, like the story of the fox and sour grapes. We tell ourselves that we don’t care, that we didn’t want it that badly anyway, and we’ve got so many better things to do. I mean, shit. . . did you guys see the latest episode of Game of Thrones?

This is how passion is extinguished, this is how the light of creativity dims, this is how all dreams end. Not with a bang, but with barely a whimper.

So how does Auden propose to avoid this terrible outcome? By something that he refers to as “enchantment”. He claims that one’s True Self can only be found in the deepest state of enchantment one has ever experienced.

The state of enchantment is one of certainty. When enchanted, we neither believe nor doubt nor deny: we know, even if, as in the case of a false enchantment, our knowledge is self-deception.

In our present context, the state of enchantment is akin to a fascination towards our craft. It’s a certainty or a belief that is not always based on a logical foundation. It’s that feeling you have when you know that you’ve found your passion, when you’ve discovered (in a manner of speaking) what you were born to do.

But even the best of things can be bad for us when consumed in excess. Even the strongest of enchantments fade with time, and sooner or later we find ourselves walking alone. Most people have one of two reactions to this scenario: they either deny their vision, claim that it must have been an illusion and, consequently grow hardhearted and cynical; or they make futile attempts to recover their vision by force, i.e., by returning to their initial source of inspiration over and over again, or resorting to more crude methods such as alcohol or drugs.

But there is a third option: when confronted by the harshness of reality and circumstance, the struggling artist (and I use this term to describe anyone grappling with a creative endeavor) can choose to embrace the truth instead of trying so hard to run away from it.

Acknowledging the truth in all its naked glory is hard. No one wants to admit that they might not be working as hard as they could or that they’ve greatly overestimated their own abilities. But there is a power in facing reality head-on, a strength that can only be achieved by being brutally honest with ourselves.

Perhaps its true that the only way to overcome self-doubt is to have a little bit of faith, in both ourselves and our circumstances. But in order for that faith to be genuine, it must be founded on the firm basis of reality. It means doing away with the lamentations of the lack of time, it means refusing to accept shoddy excuses for sacrificing the quality of one’s work, it means being willing to face a little failure every now and then; it means taking things as they come a day at a time, not how we’d want them to be. . . .

It means being honest: with those around us, and most important of all, ourselves.

“Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand… the full engagement with this strange and shimmering world.” — Alan Lightman