Reflecting Upon Six Years of the Creative Life

For twenty-six years, I was hiding. I let the world see only half of me. I didn’t want anyone to know how weak and vulnerable I was at my core, so I would reveal only what I wanted them to see. Behind the mask, I was deeply sensitive and fragile. My heart had been broken upon birth and it proceeded to break many times over as I grew.

Certain people throughout my school life could sense that I was wearing a mask, and they would do all that they could to tear it off so that I would stand exposed in all my fragility and vulnerability. I felt lost and lonely around such people for so many years. None of my friends truly knew me. How could they when I didn’t really know myself? I had not allowed myself to explore the depths of my own ocean, and I paddled around at the shore trying desperately to be noticed by loungers on the beach.

I sometimes feel a little sad that I never found an outlet for the pain of my many heartbreaks as a child. I find myself wondering what further pain I might have avoided had I understood the powers of art back in my youth. Pain, however, as I have now learnt firsthand, is necessary training as we aim to become warriors of the light, and we find our own means to deal with it when the time is right.

It has now been six years since I picked up a camera and began creating for the first time to deal with my pain. To say that my life has changed would be an understatement.

It is as though the camera has given my deeper self a voice. That part of me that, for as long as my memory serves, has been so desperate to be seen and heard is now making himself known to the world. No longer do I feel as though I am having to act as a means of gaining acceptance and approval from the people around me. No longer do I need to hide the rawest and most beautiful parts of myself. I seek not for anything from anyone because I have everything that I will ever need here within. Instead of waving my arms, desperately trying to be seen, I have been swimming alone, choosing instead to see myself, and now, paradoxically, the world appears to be noticing.

My work stands as a beacon in the icy landscape at dawn, and those who recognise truth have been finding their way to me and warming their hands and hearts on my flame. For other people, when looking at my photographs, they might see only pretty photographs of trees in mist. What isn’t evident immediately are the depths to which I have been swimming to find these parts of myself that have made creativity possible.

For six years now, I have been healing my wounds and taking tentative footsteps from behind the stage curtain, revealing my true self as the fragile and wounded being that I am. This creative journey has forced me to strip back the layers of masks that I spent the first chapter of my life wearing as a means to survive this often cruel and volatile world.

My trust with this world is being rebuilt with every click of my cameras’ shutter, and with each photograph that I create, I get a step closer to reconstructing the bridge that was severed between my inner world and the outer world during my broken youth.

The more that I open my heart to the world, the more the world opens to me. No longer do I feel the need to hide. No longer am I ashamed of my wounds. I wear them now as a badge of honour. It is because of my wounds that I am strong. My broken heart is on display like a piece of Japanese kintsugi, and I welcome visitors from all walks of life to admire my exhibition piece.

This has been a truly beautiful process. In going out to get lost in the natural world, I have found myself, and now, six years on, I somehow find that Self in a position to help others with their own journey’s of self-discovery. Now that I am here, I can’t help but beg the question, ‘what else might be possible in this life of mine?’

The Power of Creativity to Transform and Transcend

I held onto a great deal of fear throughout much of my early life. My deepest fear was that of men throughout my younger years. The three beasts that raised me broke me down and shamed me, and they inflicted a great deal of further pain onto everyone else around them. Through these men, I learnt to fear my own masculinity. My greatest fear, therefore, was myself, or rather, the fear of what I might become. As a result, I spent a long time hiding from the world and harboured a deep fear of being seen in the light of who I was.

By going out in search of photographs, I embarked upon the quest to find my own truth. En route towards that, I have been finding many of the missing parts of my own psyche and soul. Like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, I have been piecing myself together over the past few years, adopting new parts and cutting away the old. Creating from my own place of pain has eased much of my own suffering. By exposing my wounds to the light and revealing my own darkness to myself and the world through my creative works, I have been busy disarming my demons and learning how to dance with them in the moonlight.

The camera came to me at a point in my life when I was struggling to navigate through the darkness of night. I had found myself drifting without purpose or direction. In fact, bar the childhood dream that I had of playing football professionally, I never did have much of an idea of where I wanted my life to lead.

Those who don’t determine a course of their own end up getting caught in the wake of those who do, and that is what was happening to me until I picked up the camera and pen almost six years ago. The practices of photography and writing helped me to find new direction, and access the very depths of my own soul; some of which I was always aware of, others, even still, are unknown to me.

Though I often walked with a heaviness and lingering sense of listlessness throughout most of my early years, I had no idea of the heavy emotional baggage that I had buried down in the unconscious valleys of my mind. That is, until I began exploring my own creativity with the camera and reflecting upon the things that I had created with my pen. Through creativity, we are able express our truest and most authentic selves. For many of us in the world, that ‘Self’ is the one that we are so desperate to reveal, having spent such a long time trying to hide it through fear of judgment, rejection, or shame.

Creativity, I believe, is the most powerful instrument for healing that we have in our inventory. Creativity has an unseen power to transform and transmute our greatest pain and suffering. By creating something beautiful from the place of our deepest struggles, we disarm our most frightening demons. By walking fearlessly into our darkest caves, and shining our light from within, we can face these ugly forces head on and learn how to tame them.

When we find enough courage to create from the deepest depths of our hearts, we can take our demons by the hand, blind them with our radiant light, and lead them to an eternal dance beneath the glowing moon.

It is in this very darkness, that we find the truest and most potent of all powers here on earth. To create from the source of our greatest pain brings the ultimate liberation. By visiting these frightening places within ourselves, we learn to wield the sword of darkness and bring it forth into the light of day, forcing our demons to yield before us.

This eternal dance between the threshold of darkness and light is one of pure beauty. By mastering the steps, we can integrate the lost parts of ourselves, heal our deepest wounds, and become more whole human beings. One force cannot exist without the other, and to become aware that both darkness and light exist inside of oneself, to know both intimately and to know how to make one yield whenever necessary, to grasp a firm hold on the darkness and expose it to the light; that is our ultimate superpower.

By harnessing the power of our creativity and creating from this place of truth, we become alchemists of the modern world; transmuting our own emotional pain and suffering. The ability to perform such inner magic brings the ultimate sense of freedom and the very healing that we need to exist fully as our soulful selves here on earth. It gives us the ability to create light from our darkness, and pure beauty out of the ugliness that we all have within ourselves.

‘Seeking Bliss’ - A photograph by Brad Carr.

People are often shocked when I tell them that many of my photographs contain anger in them. There seems to be a general surprise that something so beautiful can contain such a dark and ‘ugly’ emotion. We are led to believe that we should fear the darkness, and, in turn, the darker emotions like anger that exist within ourselves. I can’t help but wonder why. Isn’t it within the purity of darkness that we are all formed? Anger, as far as I am now aware, is the greatest catalyst for growth and a fuel for change. Anger, when harnessed, is the most potent of emotions, and can quickly be transmuted into love. Without the feelings of anger from my childhood, I don’t believe that my creativity would exist in it’s current form.

Nothing has been more cathartic to me than finding my own way to express these emotions through creativity, therefore, revealing a more pure, whole, and authentic version of myself to the world. In doing so, I have found a light within my own darkness. I have attributed meaning and purpose to my most painful experiences and memories, and, therefore, made peace with them. By accessing my own creativity, my pain has become my power.

I feel with such strength that all of us could benefit from finding our own method to release emotional baggage, particularly the darker emotions that are buried down in the unconscious depths of our psyche. For me, there is no better way to do so than by transmuting them into something beautiful that adds value to the world; be it via a photograph, book, video, poem, dance, song, or any other method that you care to imagine.

When we increase our own awareness of our abilities to imagine, to seek inspiration, and to create, we can break down the barriers and move beyond the limiting beliefs that we have chosen to adopt throughout our lives so far. By doing so, we regain control of our own destiny, take over the helm and decide which port we are sailing towards.

Not only do we create the work itself, but we, in turn, become the creators of ourselves and our own individual futures, as well as the future of our species as a collective. That future is, no doubt, a brighter one, should we all learn how to better navigate our complex emotional landscapes by further understanding and utilising the power of creativity to dance with our own demons underneath the moonlight and tame our own darkness with light.