The Pain of Not Using What’s Inside You

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LEARN how to answer anyone’s questions — including your own. Learn the full framework in the LIVE COURSE: https://soulwords.org/how 📅 Course starts March 16 I was in my 20s and I was depressed. And I don’t know if you’ve ever been in your 20s, but pretty much the default is you’re depressed. You go through a lot of changes. You’re an. adult, but you’re not an adult, and you’re trying to figure out life. It’s a tough age. And for me especially, it was a tough age. I confided in my mother because my mother was trustworthy. I always trusted her. I could always talk to her openly. I told her I wasn’t feeling good. Not clinically depressed where it was an emergency — just not having a good time in life right now, to state it mildly. At some point, she told me something very, very useful — something I never forgot. She quoted Abraham Maslow: “Creative capacities clamor to be occupied.” If you have creativity that you’re not using, that itself can cause emotional distress. Not that it’s the cure for everything. Not that it’s the sole cause of how you’re feeling. But if you have an ability and you’re not using it, it’s going to cause distress. Decades later, I saw the same idea in a letter of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. The Rebbe said that if you have an ability and you don’t use it, you might think it’s just a passive loss. But it’s not. It’s actually a negative. When you have something in you that could be expressed and you’re not expressing it, it causes problems. You have to get it out. Creativity is part of our basic wellness. You have to be expressing yourself. That idea pushed me to write, to speak, to express myself, to think — to take something apart in twenty different ways, put it back together, and try to come to a conclusion. Sometimes what hurts isn’t what’s happening to you. It’s what’s inside you that isn’t coming out. #Creativity #MentalHealth #PersonalGrowth #SelfExpression #Psychology