A Beacon in the Dark Sea

On finding a strong harbor for my creative vulnerability

Photo by Michael Krahn on Unsplash

One of my proudest achievements was the day I signed my employment contract with the university. But the path that led me there wasn’t what I expected. I was looking for a way to find freedom—the freedom to have time and the freedom to explore what truly interests me.

I thought academic freedom would empower me to explore and write the way I imagined Martin Luther or Karl Barth had experienced it. But for me, it turned out to be quite the opposite of what I had imagined. And perhaps that’s because of the naivety and childish superficiality from which this imagination sprang. But there are still good reasons to believe that academic freedom was the main factor that empowered Martin Luther and Karl Barth to write, to argue, and to fight in this way for the vision they held—for a better world. These men serve as placeholders for any hero you might have—it’s just a biographical coincidence that these two names are part of my pantheon.

You see, my heroes are writers; no wonder I aspire to be one myself. Therefore, I thought the place where they became great authors could be the place where I, too, could learn to become one myself: the theology department of a university. And so I became a proud member of a historically renowned one—because Karl Barth (one of the most famous and widely read Protestant theologians of the 20th century) had held a professorship there for over 30 years.

So I was proud—and still am—to be a member of this faculty, but pride comes before a fall. I should have realized that acting like my heroes and being part of the same institution they were part of are two entirely different things.

I was struck by an idea long before I started working for the university. The idea that only work for which someone pays money is valuable. So I began my writing career by starting a blog.

At first, I wrote whatever I felt like, but soon another ambition made itself felt: I wanted to be read.
It was a good thing there were plenty of blogs touting promising methods for gaining an audience in no time. Everyone agreed that what really mattered was a regular and reliable posting schedule. Anyone who posted only occasionally—no matter how outstanding the quality of their writing—would simply get lost in the sea of newsletters and news feeds. Just to stay afloat in the competition for attention, you’d have to publish something every week. This argument—that quality would sort of sort itself out over time—seemed a bit flimsy to me, but I was all too willing to swallow this bitter pill in exchange for the promise of guaranteed success.

The creators of the blogging platform Ghost.org call this the Follower Funnel in their newsletter. Content strategy is what it’s called in professional circles, and that’s how I learned that you proceed in four stages to turn casual readers into fans and fans into paying customers. That’s how I came up with a plan to maybe one day earn a living independently and on my own—through my writing.

Unbeknownst to me, I had signed a contract with my imagined future, one that obligated me to joyfully subordinate the literary aspirations—which had once been idealistically ignited while reading Martin Luther and Karl Barth—to the monetary demands of the real working world. In the vague hope that this would bring me one step closer to the dream of one day writing texts on par with those of my heroes.

Disillusionment wasn’t long in coming; as I diligently produced content for that future purpose, my topics grew increasingly superficial and came to resemble the generic articles that have long since flooded the internet. Whereas at the beginning I had reflected on “The Loveless Cross” and deconstructed the romantic notions of my evangelical piety, my publications began to be titled “Keys to Productivity,” in which I summarized facts and tips from YouTube videos.

Unconsciously, the focus of my attention had shifted dramatically—I was no longer writing to explore the world, complex ideas, or my faith, but simply to have written something. To meet my weekly goal—completely indifferent to what I wrote about or how I wrote it. The goal was no longer to develop my skills as a writer, but to one day be able to make a living from it. My altered purpose had corrupted my original motive beyond recognition.

Over time, I began to write less frequently and found more and more excuses as to why other things were more important—until, at some point, I stopped writing altogether. Not for my blog, not for myself—nothing.
My plans for the future—to become self-employed—hadn’t brought me a single step closer to my dream; perhaps they had even taken me further away from it than before. What had happened?

At first, I blamed myself: You’re just too undisciplined! You just have to stick with it! Only those with staying power can succeed!

So I began writing blog posts again in phases and, at times, publishing regularly for many weeks. Time and again, I was interrupted by dry spells and disappointment in myself—in my failure to be truly consistent.

So, at times, I also began to doubt my relationship with writing because it must have been the case that I didn’t actually enjoy writing—how else could I explain my failure—if not through a misjudgment of my original motivation? This had given me the impetus to make such a commitment in the first place. My explanation was that I had been deluding myself.

But in the end, that might just be an excuse—a coping strategy to avoid making concessions to that one voice inside me, the one that begins to push its way to the forefront from the otherwise softly whispering babble of voices, the voice that whispers softly: “Give up writing! You just aren’t cut out for it! Others can do it better; there’s no place here for losers and failures like you!”

Whatever it was, I had broken the contract with myself—more than once.
It came in handy when I was able to sign a real, legally binding employment contract that, in the broadest sense, officially commissioned me to write.

What had become of the allure of financial independence, of earning a living on my own, or of the success that could motivate my inner slacker to write? Signing the contract was initially a relief and felt like a long-awaited triumph.

But did I really want to write “scientifically”? Did I really want to pursue an “academic career”? At times, I truly believed this was my life’s goal. Looking back, however, it seems more obvious to me that I had merely exchanged the informal contract with my future—to become financially independent so I could pursue my dream—for a formal contract. But such contracts come at a price—always.

So at the university, I learned the hard way what happens when you ignore this. I still remember sitting in my advisor’s office a while ago, with him sitting across the table and my thesis proposal in front of us on the table. I had spent the last year pursuing a question that genuinely kept me awake at night. Furthermore, I was beaming when I handed him the draft. He didn’t even look past the title. He leaned back, sighed, and said, “Ruben, this is ambitious, but it’s not scientific. If you want to stay in academia, you need to write about what your peers in the field appreciate.”

In that five-second moment, as I looked at his neatly organized bookshelf, something snapped inside me. My enthusiasm didn’t just wane; it felt as though it were actively breaking my heart.

What I experienced back then is what psychologists call the overjustification effect. It’s the tragic mechanism by which an internal passion is slowly stifled by external demands.

So I remember another situation, sitting in a seminary class, discussing a dissertation with the professor. I argued that an independent study regarding empowerment would be more interesting and also more appropriate than interpreting an unrelated concept in the work of a theologian like Karl Barth. What I find intriguing, after all, is precisely what the doctoral candidate associates theologically with the concept, and the reason for this interest is to be found not in Karl Barth, but in the current situation—but it is precisely this situation, the author’s context, that, when described and understood, enables the reader to grasp the existing conflict and thus the relevance of this concept to resolving this theoretical, discursive, and theological problem, and to follow the author’s line of reasoning. When the professor responded that this wouldn’t be scientific—that we can’t write about what interests us or our perspective, but must instead write about other scholars like Karl Barth—he added that there is no other option because we are scholars, and that’s simply how scholars write. That was literally his closing argument.

The lack of courage—or even of interest—in pursuing a question or a topic for its own sake. Rather, the obligation imposed on me by the signed contract to instead follow the incentives to pursue only those topics and questions capable of increasing my market value. The purpose of becoming a predefined character in a prewritten play—a scholar, a professor, or a theologian—or at least of sustaining that image of being one—began to dawn on me. It was not what I wanted, and therefore the university was no longer the place that could—or wanted to—instill in me the courage to pursue my dreams. It ceased to be the place where I belonged.

Not only that, but it’s the same here as it is behind the academic walls: the incentives to make a living from what I initially thought was my passion—through work that had nothing to do with the motives that led me to pursue an academic career—began to feel as though they were hurting my heart; my passion, my enthusiasm, and my genuine interest began to decline rapidly.
The contract I had signed became the prison I felt closing in around my writing, my thinking, and my purpose. So it was time to break out of this self-imposed prison.

At that time, I was reading the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. The book was like a beacon in a dark sea for me—it gave me hope again and helped me not to give up on my creative dream (just yet). I found particular encouragement in Cameron’s perspective on creativity as a mystical experience of oneness. She points out that while religious people refer to God as the Creator, “they seldom see ‘Creator’ as the literal term for ‘artist.’” Therefore, she strongly suggests taking this notion “literally.” In her words: “You are seeking to forge a creative alliance, artist-to-artist, with the Great Creator.”

I find myself time and again getting stuck, failing to finish a text, or simply hitting a wall and giving up because a voice inside me repeats like a mantra that what I’m creating is inadequate, inferior. Others—who are more experienced and talented—would have or have long since completed what I presume to begin. Presumably that’s even true, not just subjectively, but perhaps even objectively, that’s how it is.

Steven Pressfield calls this inner saboteur “Resistance”: Resistance is the force that hinders us from fulfilling our creative urge, and it does this, among other things, by rationalizing.

“Rationalization is Resistance’s spin doctor. It’s Resistance’s way of hiding the Big Stick behind its back. Instead of showing us our fear (which might shame us and impel us to do our work), Resistance presents us with a series of plausible, rational justifications for why we shouldn’t do our work. What’s particularly insidious about the rationalizations that Resistance presents to us is that a lot of them are true. … What Resistance leaves out, of course, is that all this means diddly. Tolstoy had thirteen kids and wrote War and Peace. Lance Armstrong had cancer and won the Tour de France three years in a row—and counting.”

While Steven Pressfield primarily rubs salt in the wound and exposes an artist’s unconscious suffering so that they can confront it head-on, Julia Cameron takes a different approach. For her, it’s about recovery; that’s the title of a chapter in her book that’s important to me: “Recovering a Sense of Identity.” In it, she describes how trusting one’s own creativity is unfamiliar territory for many. So much so that it can feel threatening at first—not only for ourselves, but also for our “intimates.”

“We may feel—and look—erratic. … It is important to remember that at first glance, becoming sane feels just like going crazy.” But both emphasize that the artist himself is merely the medium of the Creator, the universe, or the muse. Therefore, two of Julia Cameron’s basic principles revolve around this idea: “Creativity is God’s gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God. … Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity.” So—to quote a third principle—it’s not that we’re fulfilling a selfish solipsism within ourselves, but rather the will of the Creator of the universe: “When we open ourselves to our creativity, we open ourselves to the Creator’s creativity within us and our lives.”

To rationalize also means to overjustify yourself—perhaps as I am still doing here; I don’t know. Therefore, Pressfield describes how a true professional artist does not do that:

“We do not overidentify with our jobs. We may take pride in our work; we may stay late and come in on weekends, but we recognize that we are not our job descriptions. The amateur, on the other hand, overidentifies with his hobby, his artistic aspiration. He defines himself by it. He is a musician, a painter, a playwright. Resistance loves this. Resistance knows that the amateur composer will never write his symphony because he is overly invested in its success and terrified of its failure. The amateur takes it so seriously that it paralyzes him.”

And I realized that I’ll never write my novel if I identify myself as something I’m not yet—if I strive for an identity instead of simply doing my job, I will never become that identity. So it comes as no surprise that Pressfield describes the ultimate virtue as the will to die.

“Someone once asked the Spartan king Leonidas to identify the supreme warrior virtue from which all others flowed. He replied: ‘Contempt for death.’ For us as artists, read ‘failure.’ Contempt for failure is our cardinal virtue. By confining our attention territorially to our own thoughts and actions—in other words, to the work and its demands—we cut the ground from beneath the blue-painted, shield-banging, spear-brandishing foe.”

I began to realize that the contract I signed wasn’t an eternal one; I hadn’t sold my soul—even if it sometimes felt that way—and I always had the option to leave. So I did; I began to leave behind the ruins of my old, self-deprecating self-image.

Neither my fantasy of writing like Karl Barth or Martin Luther, nor my desire to make a living from it, nor my sense of duty toward my employer—none of these commitments can replace the formless joy of the activity itself. Some call it “flow,” some call it a “journey”; I call it art. By art, I mean that state of weightlessness in which writing becomes not the end in itself, but a means to an end. Writing itself is not the purpose, but the sufficient tool for it. But what, then, is it—what is the desirable goal that I associate with writing?

It is not the act of writing that fascinates me, but the result—the clarity that comes with it. The fact that, through this act, I have explored, approached, and shed light on a question, a topic, or something that was previously unclear, blurred, distant, and shrouded in darkness. That through writing a text, through clear and thoughtful prose, I was able to cast something in a new light.

Perhaps it was my fascination as a reader—pondering texts that opened up new horizons for me, that simultaneously awaken a love of reading, and that thereby provide a gateway to the world which I experience not only as fascinating, but also as transcendent, catalytic, and cathartic all at once. A gateway that isn’t simply a given or readily available, but one created by people, by writers—magical portals into foreign, unapproachable worlds that, once you step through them as a reader, suddenly begin to feel close and familiar.

It is this insatiable desire to learn more and more about our world, about ourselves, about our thinking, and about the psychological mechanisms that guide and drive us—that compels me to no longer remain merely a passive participant in humanity’s conversation, but to actively contribute to opening up new worlds and deepening our understanding of familiar ones.

That is what I truly want; that is what writing really means to me, and the meaning that has been obscured and whitewashed by all the external distortions of purpose (money, prestige, career, authority). Writing, in the sense I use it here, has only one meaningful purpose for me: to lure thinking and compassionate beings into foreign, fascinating worlds and to reveal the unspeakable.

For me, writing is “magic, freed from the lie of being truth” (Adorno). Writing is the tool to free oneself from the lie, to simply write—to do what anyone else could do better, faster, and more profoundly, if only they wanted to. To overcome the banality of truth and to gaze into the fantastic reality behind it, behind everything—that is why I write.

So, in a nutshell, what I realize in its entirety is that the contract of my heart—the contract I have with God, with the universe—is really what should guide my decisions, and not—never—a piece of paper I signed my name on. So from now on, I pray the way Julia Cameron taught me: “Great Creator, I will take care of the quantity. You take care of the quality.”