You may as well give the ghosts a job

The first day of any arts college should be a psychological evaluation.

Students should be required to answer a series of questions about their mental and emotional health. It’s the official diagnostic for artists in the making.

But there are no right or wrong answers. It’s not a gauge of stability, but of truth. Because each person’s creative power depends on it.

For example, the diagnostic could start off with a section on obsessions.

*What thought or feeling shows up uninvited at least once a day?
*When you’re alone and your mind drifts, where does it always go?
*What part of yourself do you most wish other people understood without you explaining it?

Maybe the young animator thinks to himself, well, every day while I’m exercising, I have intrusive and disturbing thoughts about someone I love dying brutally. Good. No judgments or pathologies. Clearly death is a primary emotional texture that lives in your inner world.

You’re not broken, you simply have access to extremes that most people are too numb or afraid to visit. That high resolution imagination will come in handy. As you progress in your drawing classes, treat your worst recurring thought as a genre. Think about what it means to love something so much that your brain tries to rehearse its destruction.

Wow, that’s powerful source material for a comic strip, animated series or puppet show.

Another section in the diagnostic is trauma.

*What formative wound do you revisit in your work?
*Describe a moment from your life that created a before and after split in your psyche.
*Is there a fear you’re most loyal to?

Imagine the novice songwriter reflecting, well, I was bullied mercilessly as a kid. He violated my personal space and property on a daily basis, and that’s probably why I have serious boundary issues in my relationships.

That’s gold. That’s a spine you can build your entire musical career around. All that unprocessed rage. All that lack of control. It’s not too much, it’s the exact right amount. Audiences love songs about that. Whether you write cathartic synth pop songs, confessional singer songwriter ballads, or prog concept albums, the pain you express could be universally appealing to anyone who’s felt controlled.

Look, if you’re going to be haunted anyway, you may as well give the ghosts a job. Try viewing them as unmanaged psychic energy. Channel them in service of your goals.

Ultimately, my diagnostic tool helps young creators reverse engineer their work based on their own neuroses, dysfunctions and mental liabilities. Once students reach the end of the assessment, there’s also a section called the final declaration. Fill in the blank style.

If I don’t make art about _______, it will eat me alive.
If I am brave enough to create from ______, I will finally be free.

This exercise could be life changing. Remember, these kids will have this realization sooner or later. So we may as well front load it.

What would really be cool is if the answers to each student’s questions became the syllabus for the rest of the semester. I can almost picture that awkward, anxious nineteen year old on the first day of class.

Bailey turns in her exam like she’s handing over something sacred. And on the walk home from class that night, she wonders what she just got herself into. Bailey considers emailing the professor about dropping the class.

But on day two, she comes back to the lecture hall, and the professor walks in holding a stack of manilla folders. No greetings. No slide decks. Just this.

Okay gang, each of you already wrote the syllabus for my class. I simply transcribed it.

He drops the folders on each desk, one by one, like dealing tarot cards. Each one has a personalized cover letter from the professor himself.

Bailey, I read your exam twice. Once as a teacher, and once as someone who has spent their life trying to earn love by being perfect. You said you wanted to create stories that make people feel less alone in their anxiety, and that’s precisely what we’re going to do. This semester, you’re going to explore your belief that being flawless is the price of being safe. That narcissist father of yours, who only loved you when you excelled, that’s merely one of your many sources of creative fuel.

I know that your trauma isn’t the most interesting thing about you, and soon you will too. My promise as your instructor is, as long as you stay in the room, as long as you don’t quit, you will hear your own voice before some asshole corrects it. Welcome to introduction to creative writing. Welcome to the first draft of freedom. Open your folder.

Bailey opens hers. There’s a full semester outline based on this diagnostic to syllabus model. Complete with prompts, projects, assignments, exercises, field trips and other creative tasks, tailored to her inner world.

For example, here’s an excerpt from her syllabus.

Bailey, you revealed you have intrusive thoughts about your dad being crushed by a vending machine. Your first assignment will revolve around the theme of catastrophic imagination. Your intrusive thoughts are not evidence of madness. They’re misfired rehearsals for grief. You’re not broken from imagining this scenario. You’re simply preparing for the fact that everything you love is perishable. Your brain thinks it can outmaneuver the pain by scripting it early.

But just like the bag of cheese puffs has an expiration date, so does your grief. For this assignment, write an essay in which the vending machine is a metaphor for fate, fatherhood, perfectionism and love. You can even research actual vending machine fatalities.

Just know this. Your mind doesn’t want your dad to die. It just wants to know it will survive if he does.

My new diagnostic will be a groundbreaking shift for arts education. Enough safe spaces. It’s time to make people’s trauma into coursework.

Instead of teaching students how to find their voice, we flat out tell them, your voice has been screaming for years. Now it’s time to do something with it.

In fact, why limit it to just college students? Any artist could benefit from this kind of exercise.

Reverse engineering your creative work based on your own neuroses, dysfunctions and mental liabilities, it’s the perfect companion to people’s existing therapeutic and pharmaceutical interventions. If enough artists were brave enough to try it, we could wipe out writer’s block within two years.

I said it before and I’ll say it again.

If you’re going to be haunted anyway, you may as well give the ghosts a job.

They love to work. Wearing sheets and rattling chains is too labor intensive.