When you become more creative, you feel like your life is becoming more chaotic, and you just feel like you’re amidst chaos all the time.

You might blame it on the nature of what you have chosen to be your main or favorite form or type of creative expression.

But it has nothing to do with it.

You might also think that it is because you’re showing up in public, and you’re subjecting yourself to criticism and judgment by everybody on the face of the earth.

You might be tempted then to think that a life where you get to only survive will be easier and less stressful, and prefer hiding your talents and creative powers and potential from the whole world, thinking that this will be the answer to your perpetual state of anxiety and overwhelm.

But it has nothing to do with any of the above.

The main reason for your anxiety is that you feel your life is being wasted no matter what you do or how hard you work all the time, because your creative potential and powers are held back from their full expression with as much quantity and quality as possible, by fatigue. You cannot create all the time at maximum capacity and peak performance, and maintain maximum production quality and quantity for long, until you find yourself held back by fatigue and low energy. Which makes you think the only way to avoid a decline in the quantity of your creative output is to remain consistent as much as possible. And if you fail to maintain that consistency and momentum, you get bombarded by a sense of guilt for having been responsible for wasting your life and your creative potential. That’s why you never feel like you’ve done enough. Even if you’ve done enough for a whole day, it still feels like whatever that you’ve accomplished so far your whole life is still nothing.

This has nothing to do with feeling not good enough no matter how successful you are. This is only because you feel like you’ll always be not doing or accomplishing enough, no matter what you do or how hard you try, because the standard by which others judge how good you’ve been doing recently is relative to fatigue and how much you can do and how far you can go as a human being limited by fatigue in one session or in one day.

This is good enough for a whole month, week, or year. Yeah, but is it enough for me to consider myself not having wasted my talents or creative potential? Did I make the most out of my talents, creativity, intelligence, cognitive powers and abilities, and creative powers and potential, my whole life so far or overall, with disregard to fatigue and burnout? Or did I just end up taking it easy, and pacing myself, and doing the bare minimum, even though the results are still impressive for others, but does not necessarily mean I made the most out of my creativity, or of what I truly have and what I’m truly capable of, if I did not take fatigue into account or consideration when I’m making such judgment or assessment?

The question will always haunt you.

It will never feel enough for this simple reason. You can do more, and you could’ve done infinitely way more than whatever you’ve accomplished so far your whole life, if it weren’t for fatigue. For your primitive brain, that’s not an excuse. And hence the perpetual shame, self-loathing, low self-esteem, hopelessness, depression, and guilt you feel after every creative session, because you could’ve done more, but you didn’t, even if it were through no fault of your own.

Allowing yourself to be as creative as you can possibly be is like allowing yourself to get angry when necessary. These newly expressed parts of you were previously associated with shame, and you exercised extreme levels of control to suppress them all your life. It is only normal to feel out of control, or chaotic, when you stop suppressing those parts of you, and finally allow yourself to be fully who you truly are.