#creative-catharsis

#creative-catharsis

The only thing worse than making a mistake is keeping it bottled up inside. Learning from the mistakes of others could help you embark on the healing journey of sharing and working through a mistake of your own, with someone you trust.

On the first hike, about half-way up the mountain, I reached a point where the path was too slippery, steep and scary. Even though my wonderful guide talked me through the tough parts, I finally realized I'd have to do the same thing going back downhill. So, I stopped. I sat on a moss covered rock. I enjoyed the forest flowers and tree bark and birds and ferns and more.

Devon Hase states, 'People are trying desperately to fix, optimize, or escape their way out of relationship difficulty - and suffering more for the effort. Social media has made this worse! We're surrounded by images of perfect partnerships while quietly drowning in our own ordinary struggles.' This highlights the pressure couples feel in the age of social media.

When the Academy Award Nominations were announced late last month, you could be forgiven for thinking they were lifetime achievement awards. In the Best Supporting Actor category, 74-year-old Stellan Skarsgård is competing against 73-year-old Delroy Lindo. (Sean Penn, at 65, and Benicio Del Toro, at 58, also in the category, are mere babes.) Amy Madigan, 75, is up for Best Supporting Actress. One of the Best Adapted Screenplay nominees is in their sixties, and one of the Best Original Screenplay nominees is in his seventies.

It stands a hair shy of five feet tall and is a bit over one-and-a-half feet wide. Made of nine interlocking pieces of gray ribbon slate, it feels as though a small push would completely wreck it. Humpty Dumpty stands on three legs, but it looks two-dimensional. It has an ovoid shape, and it juts upwards like a flat rocket ship.

When I was studying writing in college, my personal essay class was my favorite. I'd already been journaling for almost a decade, so I understood the power of exploring life experiences through the written word. Journaling wasn't immediately helpful for me. In my younger years, I often wrote to ruminate, beat myself up, count calories, or otherwise reinforce patterns that didn't support me. But as I worked through childhood trauma in therapy and through other approaches, my writing gradually became healthier.

Creative confidence, or creative self-efficacy, is a belief that we can successfully complete tasks in the creative process, from coming up with original and valuable ideas, to judging which are the best and most feasible ones, to taking action to develop them into performances or products. Research that jointly analyzed results from 41 studies with more than 17,000 participants shows that those who have greater creative confidence tend to do better on tests of creative thinking and be more creative in what they do,