How Anxiety Can Be Your Secret Creative Superpower

A flashback to one of my first graphic essays

Hello, Anxious Party People!

There’s no Asynchronous Poetry Book Club this week as we are gearing up to start Jack Kerouac’s Book of Haikus. I thought I would drag one of my very first graphic essays out of the file cabinet.

I also wanted to let you know anyone looking to become a new paid subscriber or who may want to move from a monthly subscription to an annual subscription at a discount to be on the lookout for a special upgrade offer tomorrow.

You can see how my style has changed as my illustration and collaging skills have improved. This was originally published back in 2020 on Medium.

I hope you enjoy it!

How Anxiety Can Be Your Secret Creative Superpower

I used to control my anxiety by reminding myself that my brain was making things out to be much worse than they were. That worked for several years.

But, this strategy gradually lost its effectiveness as the state of the world around me decayed. First, I lost both my parents within five months while dealing with a mysterious gut infection that led to me being hospitalized, where I discovered I had kidney cancer.

That was 2019. After my successful surgery, I thought things had to get better.

Then 2020 came. It seemed like my anxiety was laughing at me as I freaked out, unsure if I was rational or irrational.

Now I have a new strategy for managing my anxiety. I have learned to be grateful for it.

Because of my anxiety disorder, my brain works differently. I have learned that my anxiety is my secret creative superpower.

You might wonder if you can calculate the volume of water a towel removes from your body after a shower by weighing the towel after you use it.

If you have an anxiety disorder or are neurodivergent, you may not know that thoughts like these were strictly a middle-of-the-night phenomenon for most people.

Random thoughts like these are always passing through my mind. In my world, for better or worse, it’s always 3 am.

I have anxiety brain.

I imagine that my brain has two extra parts: a random idea generator and a worst-case scenario generator. There is a narrow tube that connects these two machines. When my anxiety spikes, it’s because the random thoughts generator is funneling all of its output into my worst-case scenario generator.

Thanks to my anxiety, while many people are limited to the occasional three o’clock musing, I am inundated with exquisite, weird thoughts all day long.

These thoughts fuel my creativity and allow me to entertain friends, family, and strangers. While I may never have a million-dollar idea, I do not doubt that I will have a million one-dollar ideas. And that will get me to an even better place — creatively connected to people like you.

Your anxiety brain doesn’t have to only produce doomsday scenarios. You can use your overactive imagination to fuel your creativity. Let’s face it. Anxiety is your imagination run amok. Once you learn to harness that power, even just a little bit, you unlock a creative superpower.

Having anxiety means looking at the world differently. Is there anything more powerful than that? Every scientific, cultural, and artistic advancement in the Earth’s history has been made by weirdos who look at the world differently and imagine something better.

That can be you. Turn your anxiety brain into your secret creative superpower. The world needs you!

Be the weird you want to see in the world!

Cheers,

Jason