Writer of Eat, Pray, Love (Elizabeth Gilbert) discusses how talented people are undone by their gifts. She explores the horror an artist or creative mind experiences when they’re faced with the daunting perception that their greatest work is already behind them.

Working in creative fields, and meeting those from many backgrounds participating in the innovative edges of their industries, I often hear this fear of doom – what happens when the muse has no more to give? Everyone fears the day they will peak, dreading every future project’s destiny as a disappointment, shadowed by a previous crowning achievement.

Gilbert quotes an author as saying: “Every one of my books has killed me a little more.”

She goes on to discuss the link between creativity and mental health. The instability of the ingenious mind seems to be a real. In part there is the lack of balance – having brilliance in one area and being lacking in other attributes. The scientist without social skills, the self destructing artist, the musician that can’t add. In part I think this reputation and propensity for a cracked psyche is born of the deep connection a creative project has to the creator’s personal identity. There is quite the difference between a world of talent and task. If I fail at a task, I experience frustration but am able to forgive myself and continue on with my day. If I cannot make a personal vision come into fruition, I berate myself for incompetence.

It is not uncommon to speak to an artists or musician about a fantastic piece, only to hear them call it pitiful, their internal vision outwitting their physical ability to manifest it. We see only the stunning final work, and cannot help but be awed – the creator looks on with contempt.

Unlike Gilbert, I don’t think that this is an assumption perpetuated by society. Often those imaginative minds who suffer the pain of their gift are far beyond the reach of society, their minds operating from outside the neat little box of mediocrity and expectation. They are their own worst enemies, Ego, ID and Superego smashing into each other like waves in a chaotic storm.

She looks at ancient Greece and Rome, when creativity wasn’t the burden of the individual, but the touch of a divine spirit. The mystery of the human mind is the most baffling of all, and this paranormal explanation feels right to anyone struck by the power of inspiration. This concept of the muse sweeping down reminds me of outsider art: creative works that are born outside the boundaries of art culture. In the deadly trenches of war, the dark vacuous shadows of the Shoah, and the haunting hallways of asylums we see individuals who have never before and sometimes never again, spontaneously create beautiful, complex and powerful pieces. Their oppressing urge to express the realities of their experience through symbolic expression becomes the only release they can be afforded.

Gilbert talks to Ruth Stone who explains that she could feel a poem coming at her – a feeling I know well. It is a literal sense of words, images and emotions manifesting around you, disembodied at first. There’s a swooning sensation in the mind, a sense of distraction as the blur begins to lift, and within it, as though glancing inside of a dream I can see something taking form. I forever have a notebook and pen in my possession lest such a moment should unexpected come, knowing that once the breeze of the muse’s wings have passed, it melts into darkness and disappears. Like sand slipping though fingertips, you can feel inspiration slip out of your grip.

Gilbert believes that the ancient idea of muses provided creative minds with a safe psychological construct that allowed themselves to have distance from their work. She also presents that muses prevented artists from becoming narcissistic, they couldn’t take all the credit for the final work. This seems fanciful. Reading the works of Ovid and others, it is clear that they not only considered themselves talented, but favored by the Gods. Nothing disables the human ego.

Alas, muses disappeared with rational humanism and we could only look within ourselves for the root of inspiration. Gilbert believes this weight is too much for the human psyche: “The pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.” It is all too true that these moments of genius seem to come from outside ourselves, anthropomorphizing the experience provides a way to communicate with this mysterious aspect of the human mind that seems to have a life of it’s own. In many traditions, including pagan belief, we do not need to see a man walk on water to witness God. It is these moments when we are ablaze with effervescence, swallowed whole and in that moment entirely transformed that we are in the presence of divinity. To be graced by such a feeling would leave anyone feeling hung over, depressed by the common reality of our fallibility, hoping once more to be touched.

Instead of mourning and anguishing over the fear that divinity is forever beyond our reach, Gilbert says: Dance. Move with passion and adoration for that which you love, in celebration of the glorious possibilities, open to another visit from the muses.