The Breaking Point by Sue Shellenbarger

Author:Sue Shellenbarger
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781627798877
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

6

THE ARTIST

We are here to abet creation and to witness it, to notice each other’s beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.

— ANNIE DILLARD

At 50, it seemed Ruth was cruising the high road of life—enjoying good health, a prestigious editing career, marriage to a wonderful man, a thriving teenage son. It was only after darkness fell each evening, after she drifted off to sleep, that Ruth had trouble holding it all together.

Between midnight and dawn, dramatic characters emerged in Ruth’s semiconsciousness, having dialogues and acting out dramas. The people and plotlines so energized her that she would rise from bed to sit at her computer for hours and capture them on paper. “These ideas would start to haunt me, and I would have to get up and write them down,” she says. “It was almost as if these characters were living inside of me. They would start speaking and I would go to my computer and write what they were saying.”

She had never written a play in her life. Yet now, night after night, week after week, she was haunted by dramas of the mind. Her characters’ dialogues grew into relationships, the relationships grew into plotlines, and the plotlines grew into pages and pages of drafts of full-blown plays. Ruth soon had seventeen file folders filled with plays or dialogues. She began dreaming of becoming a playwright, of having a play produced on Broadway.

“The dream wouldn’t leave me alone,” Ruth says. Her characters began hijacking her waking hours, too. “Driving to work and coming home, I’d be in this reverie. How can I do this play, and that play? That’s all I was thinking about.”

Ruth’s dream would soon overtake her life, changing her career, her social and financial status, and her outlook on life. It was as if she had no choice. Finding her voice as a playwright “was an awakening of a part of my soul, an awakening to my true essence, to something deep inside of me that needed to be expressed,” she says. “I think if I had ignored it it would have made me very sick.”

A Core Calling. The Artist is a deeply passionate archetype that tends to turn women’s values upside down at midlife, reorganizing their entire lives around one core calling: creating their art. Among Artists in my study, most described the experience as being swept away by a current so strong that it transformed not only them, but their relationships with spouses, children, and friends.

These women had usually been sidetracked in their twenties and thirties in a way that stifled the artistic dreams of their youth. They were drawn to a different path by child-rearing, breadwinning, or the imperatives of achieving success in business. Then, after decades of drowning out the voice of self-expression, their creative side exploded at midlife.

Researchers have documented a pattern of emerging creativity at midlife. In a study of a community of folk artists ranging in age from the thirties to early fifties, one researcher found a strong link between creativity and advancing age.

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