From Martyrdom to Creativity: Embracing Wholeness and Magic

For many years, I have read and closely considered May Sarton’s poem Now I Become Myself, which begins with, ‘Now I become myself. It’s taken /Time, many years and places; /I have been dissolved and shaken, /Worn other people’s faces, /Run madly, as if Time were there, /Terribly old, crying a warning, /”Hurry, you will be dead before—”’ 

The poem ends saying, ‘Now there is time and Time is young. /O, in this single hour I live /All of myself and do not move. /I, the pursued, who madly ran, /Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!’ 

I’ve long wondered if I was being all of myself, if I was standing still and stopping the sun. 

Despite my vocation revolving around creating knowledge, I’ve never thought of myself as a creative person. I’ve moved from and made life decisions around a sense of being a good and selfless person, a smart and accomplished person. I’ve thought of myself as bold and courageous and independent. A dedicated martyr for the cause.

That’s how I approached and measured the success, and therefore worth, of what I’ve done, too. Will other people say that I am good if I do this thing? Will I be recognised as being selfless? Will this contribute to or uphold my reputation for being smart and capable and driven? If this doesn’t work out as I envisioned, am I none of those things? If I am not doing the hardest thing, am I being myself?  And if I am not sacrificing that self, am I even doing that hardest thing right? 

Basically, in pursuit of being a good and selfless person committed to justice and using my time on earth to contribute good to and reduce suffering in the world, I have been consumed by ego. And that ego has convinced me that if I am not sacrificing myself, if I am not in some way struggling or doing the hardest thing, then I am not worthy of being a human in the world. It turns out that my bare-knuckle pursuit to be a selfless person no matter the cost is, in fact, ego-driven.

So I pursued a PhD. Studying child death. In a context where child death is frequent and surrounded by suffering and injustice of the deepest forms. I aimed to do all of the hardest things, all at once. 

And I didn’t necessarily fail at that. Pursuing a PhD is very hard. Working with dying children and their families and exposing yourself to such immense suffering of the world is hard. Trying to generate meaning and learning from that and translate it into academic context is hard. 

But I’ve been clinging to the challenge of it as proof of its worth. I have built my understanding of myself on that self being sacrificed. Which, when articulated like that, seems obviously like a bad idea.

By doing so, I have found that I often focus on only the hard of it. I have only noticed and noted how difficult it is, how no one does this, how no one funds this, how no one is able to talk to me about my work, how no one else has so much emotional labour on top of their PhD labour. My mother always referred to this as my ‘nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen’ or my ‘oh woe is me’ state. She recognised it because she had the same state in herself. She was and I, like her, am, a One on the Enneagram. We Ones, the activists, the perfectionists, the idealists, the revolutionaries, are motivated by a deep sense of right and wrong and build our lives in pursuit of justice. Ghandi was a One, supposedly. So was Mother Theresa and Nelson Mandela and Plato and Immanuel Kant, apparently. We Ones like to remind people of that. 

When Ones lean toward disintegration, or fear, so the Enneagram posits, we lean toward the shadow side of an Enneagram Four and into rigidity, self-righteousness, and a sense that we are so unique that no one else could possibly ever understand us. We arm and protect ourselves and, in doing, step out of living, by building up and reinforcing a sense that we are so unique and special that we could never be known. Oh woe is me. 

Sometimes, my ‘nobody knows’ space looks like trying to convince my partner that no one could ever understand how sleepy I am. I eventually notice that that is my absurd little woe and snap out of it. 

But recently I’ve realised that maybe I was unconsciously building much of my life off of that space. I’ve been protecting myself from the vulnerability and risk of living as all of my self by positioning myself as a martyr, sacrificing myself to do the hardest things of life, and using that to explain and justify why I was only ever partially connected to myself, to those around me, and to life as a whole. If no one fully knows me, it’s because no one can fully know me, not because I don’t live all of myself or make that self wholly available to be known. If I feel like I am sacrificing connection, rootedness, health, and dynamic self, that is because I am a unique martyr, and I alone must accept this sacrifice for the good of the world. In doing so, I will not be understood or closely known, but I will be seen as good.  

This is not to say that all of the qualities I saw, valued, and wanted to foster in myself were wrong. Or that what I have done with my life to date is invalid because it was driven by a desire to be perceived as good and selfless in the face of hard. I don’t believe that. It’s certainly not to say that I do not care about, find meaning and life within, and feel a deep drive to pursue care for children and their families at the end of life. I do. 

But I’ve been doing it wrong. The thing is, when you focus on how hard a thing is, it becomes only hard. And when you build your worth on the extent to which you give up yourself, you’re going to only deplete yourself. And, when you try to live more wholly and fully and you’ve set yourself up to equate that with being a bad person, you’ll find your wholeness and your vocation in tension which each other. And that makes no sense. 

For Enneagram Ones, their space of integration and health is the light side of a type Seven. We lean toward adventure, curiosity, versatility, play, and creativity. We intentionally put ourselves into the thick of life. We are hopeful, inspired, and open. And we move from that space to pursue good and justice in the world. In other words, we chill out and let ourselves live a little. We give ourselves permission to feel joy and gladness and a sense of worth and belonging and good in being ourselves, not in the sacrificing of ourselves. 

The thing is, the more I’ve built my work, and therefore my life and sense of self and worth, on a foundation of martyrdom, the more I have tamped down the Seven in me. In so doing, I placed my identity and self-worth in opposition to my pursuit of joy, of inspiration, curiosity, openness, and light. I have placed it in opposition to creativity. 

And it’s evident. Since I began my PhD, and in most times of my life when I have felt I am doing a hard, serious, important, righteous, sacrificial thing, I have stopped being creative. I have stopped drawing, stopped learning new things for the sake of it, stopped making pies, stopped making for the sake of making. And I have stopped writing. Obviously, I have also been constantly writing for the last three years. But I have stopped writing as an act of crafting words into meaning, as an act of expression of self, as an act of weaving story and finding my way into wisdom through the process of putting words on paper. Instead I have written as an attempt to convince others that I am smart, to convey that I have earned a place, that my work is worth a PhD. 

And my work and self have suffered as a result. It turns out, for as much as I never identified as a creative person, when I engage life creatively is when I am most alive. When I write in ways that feel like I am pulling back layers to reach closer to truth and beauty, when I draw tree rings in intricate detail, when I explore new ideas, when I fold fruit into a delicately moulded pie crust, when I look with curiosity upon the world, I feel most alive and connected to the world as myself. 

The wonder of it all is that though I may have first found my way into work in children’s palliative and end of life care as a very young person and into this particular PhD from that foundation of martyrdom, in drawing near enough to this most intimate and fragile aspect of human life, I have witnessed that it is so much more than the hardest thing. But they have shown me that they are so much than that, their lives and stories and what we can learn about how to be human together are so much deeper and richer and more whole than my own martyrdom or what I assumed in them. So in a sense, though I entered into this passion from one, deficient angle, it has transformed me to now see it from another, growing in me a whole new passion for it, and in so doing, it has taught me to do the same for myself. 

I can now see that when I feel most wholly fulfilled and enlivened by my work is when I find myself not knowing what to do but showing up anyway, when I find myself open enough to laugh and to cry alongside a family, when I am able to bring all of myself into the present so that I can listen deeply to the story of a family and curiously and gently ask another question to draw them further toward their truth. And what I am passionate about is not that sitting next to a dying child is the hardest and most moral thing to do, it is that how the families I work with live through, grieve, cultivate meaning, and find the words to tell their story surrounding such deep moral rupture as the death of a child has something to teach all of us about we might be human together. And then, when I take that presence and care and listening and let it pour out through my fingers and onto the page, that is when I believe most fully in my particular magic aligning with the particular magic that the world needs. Then, I find myself creating something beautiful.   

So it’s not that my PhD is counter to creativity. Or that I have been wrong about my vocation because I have sacrificed myself in pursuit of it. It is that because I thought I had to sacrifice myself and my creativity in pursuit of my vocation, I have been sacrificing my ability to fully live into my vocation. Because the magic of my work isn’t, in fact, in its appearance as smart and accomplished and selfless. My PhD supervisors keep reminding me of that fact; any time I force myself to write in a way that I think is what I’m supposed to write, in a way that will convince others that I’m worth a PhD, and not in the way that I actually write, or in a way that enlivens the deepest parts of me or these deeper things I have learned, my work falls short. Way short. And, I don’t enjoy it. I don’t feel passionate about it or feel like I’m creating a beautiful thing or like I’m living as me. I certainly don’t feel like I’m doing justice to the complex beauty of the stories I am privileged to hear and tell. And yet, I do believe that I hold particular magic to create something stunning and transformational and important out of this work. And when I do my work in that way, I love it and I love being me when I do it. 

So, now I wonder, what would it look like if I lived from what my work has taught me of being human, not from what I initially wanted others to perceive of it? What if I stopped being a martyr and started being a person of creativity and curiosity instead? What if I understood creativity as an act of transcendence, making born out of curiosity and giving light to the magic in me? How would the texture of my life change if I lived it creatively? What would expand if I engaged my work with child death and dying, storytelling with families, and close witnessing of suffering as an act of creativity? What if instead of focusing on how hard my work is as an indicator of its value, I focused on how beautiful my work is, how magical it is to get to be a vehicle of this deeply human meaning, to get to listen closely and weave together meaning from it? How might all of life grow deeper and richer and more beautiful if I were to show up as all of my creative self in all of it? 

I don’t have explicit answers or resulting life changes to these questions. I’m not dropping out of my PhD. I’m not definitively pursuing a career as a writer, or a Creative with a capital C. Though, I might. I’m not turning way from work with dying children. I don’t yet know explicitly what might come from reorienting my life in this way. I don’t yet know how one actually does live their whole self and also pursue good and relieve suffering at the margins of the world.

Rather, as I move to a new city next week and enter into the final six months of my PhD, I want to do so in a way that explores with curiosity what a life in answer to these questions might look like. I do so in pursuit of wholeness, of home, of expansion, and of a creative life. I want to finish my PhD from within the sense of freedom, curiosity, excitement, and energy that arises in me when I think of it as a creative endeavour, when I think of its value and worth as an expression of magic – both mine and that of these children and their families. I want to move to a new place, buy groceries, plant a garden, make pies, draw, write for the sake of writing, share my words and ideas and thoughts beyond the bounds of academic requirements, build community with rigour, make a home with a crowded table, live in partnership with another, pursue rootedness and staying put, through the lens of creativity and to see what expands and unfolds when I do so. I want to intentionally set the conditions for and make a practice of creativity in all aspects of my life not as a counter-point to my current work or to my pursuit of an academic credential, but as a means of fostering and enriching it. I want to explore the next steps of my path and consider and pursue vocation with trust in my creativity and trust that, as Elizabeth Gilbert writes, my creativity and vocation love me back. I want to see what happens, who I become and what I could create, when I embrace wholeness and joy and stepping into life as me, a creative person. I do so asking what it might look like to stand still and stop the sun and attempting for my daily life to be a curious enactment of the answer. 

And, I do so with a renewed commitment to write, as one facet of embracing a sense of self as a creative person, pursuing a creative life. I do so with an intention to share that writing openly, in an effort not to be perceived in any particular way or with any explicit outcome in mind, but because I’m beginning to wonder if exploring our way into wholeness of self and doing so in connection with others is the central task for all of us.