I was watching the animated movie Orion and the Dark recently. In it, a little boy called Orion who has an active (and often, overactive) imagination faces his fears in an epic journey with someone who he fears the most at first: a creature called Dark.
In the movie, as Orion spins out into worry, Dark tells him: “Kid, you’re either extremely disturbed or extremely creative.”
That line really struck home for me. Orion reminded me a bit of me, and how things can reach outsize proportions in our minds. When we’re imaginative, sometimes, our fantasies carry us up like a balloon into the air.
But sometimes, our What ifs? become less about possibilities & instead have us careening down into fantasies about worst-case scenarios.
Our own imagination can end up scaring us. It can leave us feeling petrified.
I have talked about this before in this post: Highly Sensitive and Creative: How Negative Imagination Hurts. I have had periods like this in my life, when I didn’t feel safe and my worry spun me out of control. Instead of soaring with my imagination, I sunk like a dead weight into the morass, into murky, watery realms.
And that’s why this movie spoke so much to me.
If you’re a highly sensitive creative, I think it’ll speak to you as well!
There’s a very thin line between imagination and worry. There’s a very thin line between spinning out into possibilities & spinning inward into implosion.
I have to keep reminding myself of this. I also have to remind myself to do the one thing that calms my imagination down and gives it a vessel to flow into.
It’s to remember to practice my creativity.
Creative energy needs a place to go.
If it just stays inside us, it can create phantoms in our mind. And while anxiety has, of course, many different causes, when you are a creative person and NOT expressing your creativity, that’s a big one! Unexpressed creative energy can quickly transform into fear.
I know that when I haven’t been busy creating something, I have been busy destroying something.
If you have felt like this, channel your creative energy. Work with your hands – make “bad’ art or good sculptures, do collage or an activity like gardening – do something that takes you out of your head & moves the energy out into some form.
I really enjoyed Orion and the Dark because I felt like it had been made by people who had struggled with their own creative imagination. And now, they had used their deep creativity to talk about the little children they once were.
This movie reminded me that our creative energy is a force inside us that needs space and direction, so it doesn’t spook itself out with all the energy it contains, and in turn, spook us out.
Ritu Kaushal is the author of the book The Empath’s Journey and a Silver Medal Awardee at the Rex Awards, co-presented by the United Nations in India. Find more about Ritu HERE.
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