Creativity in the Midst of Difficulty

I blame my creative outbursts on many things, but all of them are rooted in my childhood. I was always a sickly little girl. I got pneumonia, severe dehydration, and a number of infections when I was six years old, and nearly died. Since then I was in a delicate state for the rest of my childhood, my immune system thrashed beyond repair, I was susceptible to nearly everything that went around, and was hospitalized several more times. Looking back, I see I must have been fairly isolated, but I never felt it at the time. While I had a very loving older brother who was always down to play anything from musketeers to Barbies with me, I learned, early on, the value of entertaining myself, especially when sickness took hold so much that I could not hold a plastic sword or tilt a doll’s head.
I will never forget one day, under a severe fever that left me listless, I was lying on my mother’s bed, staring at a wall, sponge-painted in mauve and green. Soon there formed patterns in it, a monkey, a trio of monkeys on a bicycle, a whole temple that the monkeys must have lived in, then cruel baboons who were invading the monkey temple, then...

Well, you get the idea. I stared at the wall, wracked by fever, for nearly an hour, inventing new and exciting twists in the great monkey-baboon war. I was pulled out of epic struggle only by pure exhaustion.

So what makes this delicate stage of my life so important? Well, like any of the other events in my childhood, it formed the way I think and the way I form ideas. Not everyone comes into their creativity in the same way, and I certainly hope no one else had to go through isolating illness and hallucinatory adventures on a sponge-painted wall to come into theirs.
But this is one example of many of the things that went into forming my imaginative state. There are others, more delightful and more tragic, that I could cite. The point is, and what I want to encourage creative individuals to realize is that all darkness has a light. I could have been a miserable child during my repeated hospitalizations and intense fevers, but I instead explored imaginative worlds, and somewhere in the midst of this period was the first time I took up a pen and wrote a story. It wasn’t simply escapism for me, it was how I made life bearable when I was at death’s door, and how I coped with realizing I was, in a sense, alone in what I was going through.
Everyone won’t go through what I did, and thank goodness, but everyone goes through something. If you explore your creativity, you will never go through those things alone.