“I’m half sick of shadows,” said the Lady of Shalott: Turn Your Weird Life into a Creative One

I’ve had a great life, but I have to admit that it’s had its fair share of weirdness. For example, I moved 26 times in my life and changed schools 8 different times before I graduated high school. I was stifled in ways that many people my age were not because of moving around so much. Changing schools always made me feel a little bit behind everyone else.

I would be at a new school, and the teacher would ask, “So, we have carnivores, herbivores, and what else?”

Shoot, I thought to myself. I haven’t learned that yet.

So throughout many of my school years, I felt slightly mentally challenged. Saying that I was insecure would be an understatement, and I often sought after things that would give me security, challenges that–if accomplished–would prove to the world that I wasn’t an idiot. I was mainly trying to prove this to myself. Furthermore, those insecurities translated into my social life. I was so afraid that people weren’t going to like me that I overcompensated by telling jokes, being loud and obnoxious, and becoming a people pleaser. I sought after relationships with overly critical people because I thought that if they liked me, then I was making a huge accomplishment. I also sought after fitting in with the popular crowd in high school because they were the hardest group to get in to, instead of making friends with people that I actually had something in common with.

Even though I often cringe at the thought of my social ineptness, I can’t help but be thankful for the things that caused it. It seems that the weirder a person’s life has been, the more creative that person is. To be an outsider looking in is to be an artist. Artists don’t always get to be right in the middle of the action, so they have more time to think about things and experience things creatively.

“The Lady of Shallot,” a ballad by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, tells the story of a woman who is being held prisoner in a tower on the Island of Shallot. While she is there, she weaves beautiful tapestries that chronicle the events of the outside world, a world that she can view only through the reflection in a mirror because of a curse.

After she can no longer handle being trapped, she escapes her prison, yet she also leaves behind her creativity. Now that she is outside, the curse is upon her, she gets in a boat with her tapestry in hand, and floats toward Camelot’s Sir Lancelot and to her demise.

Yes, she was able to to experience life for a brief moment, but she had to sacrifice her creativity.

Sometimes we look at the boundaries or the inhibitions in our life as being hindrances, but it’s important that we learn that those things that make us different from the status quo are things that can be the springboard for our creativity. Think of the greats in art, literature, and music; most came from some stifling background of sorts. So even if you have a weird family or have recently discovered your own social ineptness, you can channel those frustrations into something creative.