When You’ve Pushed Everyone Away | Diaries of a Working Creative

In my life I’ve often found myself not wholly situated.

It’s not that I need stability or deep relationships any less than others - only that I’m realising the work being at the centre of things isn’t a choice that I get to make.

This journal piece is about the isolation, belonging, and loss of innocence that many creative people have to accept, when the land of the work starts to feel more real than any other.

This week I’m building a video on Damon Albarn. And in his interview with Fantano, he said that he had regrets around his personal and professional life.

This is no surprise if you listen to the music Albarn has been putting out. Throughout the recent album with Blur and this new one for Gorillaz, we hear inside the creative mind of a searcher, who’s dealing with loss, whilst bringing forward a great amount of beauty in where he finds himself too.

Maybe I’m projecting… But the role model feels useful here.

Albarn’s music holds his relationship with the world - an outsiderness which I recognise. And an undercurrent of melancholy and acceptance - recognising how his particular makeup has shaped the kind of relationships he’s been able to have.

But how can I manage a brain that is a little obsessed with one thing? And what if a part of me wants a traditional relationship or to enter a traditional workplace?

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Zen might say something like - You shouldn’t fight who you are. A water frog is a water frog. It can’t be a land frog, and shouldn’t try to be.

Another lens that could be useful here is neurodivergence.

There’s a moment from one of the interviews with Albarn and two collaborators, where they speak about needing to finish a record, and hiding the keyboards to distract Albarn from his constant inclination to make more.

Here - in this understanding between the two other people in the room, making particular allowances for Albarn in the workspace - we see how mental health support often functions in the everyday.

Regardless of which lens you like though, and however you want to frame this (obsessive) relationship with the imaginary - looking back, my life is punctuated by times when the drive to isolate myself with the work has probably been pathological, and the act of creativity has been a hiding place or salve for something I can’t do so comfortably.

I’ve pushed loved ones away… And avoided the ability to manage complex relationships… Struggling to navigate the constant looming presence of the work I feel like I should be doing, and the constant sense of disassociation I feel when I’m not being present with it.

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Now this might not present a very pleasant picture.

But at this stage - when I’ve managed to release alcohol’s place in distorting the clarity around my decisions - how can I build a life that holds this need for space around the work, whilst finding a place where I can feel more situated and less apart?