Why Creating for Creation's Sake Might Be the Cure for Overwhelm
Yesterday I sat in a theatre and cried.
Just a few hours prior, I was crying different kinds of tears over the state of my life as I ate my cereal. Energy and worries and uncertainty — was I actually able to trust myself to pull through? Would it actually all work out okay?
Not long after that I was walking through London at rush hour, overwhelmed by traffic and people and sounds and busy-ness. It felt like everyone was clamouring to find a space inside my already-crowded mind; it felt like too much. I walked through a park with my partner and cried. It was too much.
I didn't particularly want to go to the theatre or be sociable or look like a human. There was something destructively enticing about eating the rest of my cereal and descending into a nice little pit of my own despair.
But we were over halfway to the theatre, so it would've been daft to turn back.
We arrived, I put on my human face, and I took my seat in the front row, not entirely aware of what I’d signed up for. And it was life-affirming. A tale of a trans-woman pre-op telling us her story through song. And I don’t even like musicals.
The entire performance — set, music, everything — was a reminder to create for creation’s sake. To ignore the do-more rhetoric we’ve been sold, with only end-points and metrics in mind — all the stuff that was making me overwhelmed in the first place — and to remember that we create to experience what happens to us as we do so. Not for fame or followers, but for the freshening of our souls as we sit in enquiry with ourselves and the nature of being alive.
And I cried again, but for different reasons. I cried at the magic of human creativity. I cried for the heartache of the woman in the story — being kicked out of bathrooms and jobs and her family, all because she just wanted what most of us take for granted: showing up as herself.
Yes, I cry at everything. Give me a well-timed sofa advert or a particularly cute animal, and I'm a mess. But there was a different, life-bettering emotion in the tears in the theatre. I gained perspective enough to render my worries small and manageable. I felt alive again, a part of something bigger than myself, and ready to make something creative of my own.
The antidote to my overwhelm wasn't to think more, ruminate on it, or eat an inhuman amount of cereal. The antidote has always been to participate in life again, even just a tiny amount. Creativity — and the theatre in particular — seems a pretty nice way of doing that.
Go if you can. The show was Amanda - The Night Before Me starring Divina De Campo at The Bridge House Theatre in Penge. The run ends on October 10th 2026.
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