There was a period in my life when I left it. Not literally — I didn't go anywhere dramatic. But I withdrew from the shape my life had taken and began the slow, disorienting work of finding out what was underneath. What was actually mine. What I actually believed, wanted, needed, could sustain.
It cost me things. The trust of people I loved most, for one. When you step sideways out of your own life, the people standing in it don't always understand — and why would they? It looks like abandonment. It is a kind of abandonment, even when it's also a kind of necessity. I had to earn that trust back. Slowly, accountably, with no guarantee it would work. It did work. I did it well.
But I took a gamble. And I want to sit with that for a moment before moving on, because not everyone who takes it comes back.
When a person has no scaffold for self-orientation — no cultural permission, no margin, no language for what they need — they don't simply go without. The need doesn't dissolve. It finds another door. Sometimes that door is substances, or disappearance, or a life dismantled faster than it can be rebuilt. A dangerous shortcut toward feeling real, feeling authoring of something, feeling alive in their own life. The people who love them pay a price they didn't choose. And sometimes the person who took the shortcut can't find their way back from it.
I found my way back. I want to be clear that I know that is not nothing. I know it is not guaranteed. And I know the difference between those who make it and those who don't is not always character, or will, or love for the people waiting — it is often simply whether the world offered anything to hold onto along the way.
It mostly didn't, for me. I built the handholds as I went.
That is what I mean when I ask: why did it have to be so hard? Because for some people, that hardness is not a difficult chapter. It is the end of the story.
Why was there no scaffold? Why did the culture around me — including the parts of it professionally dedicated to human flourishing — not recognize what I was doing as necessary? Why was orientation treated as optional, as indulgence, as something I could pursue after I had handled the real things?
Because what I was doing, underneath all of it, was a creative act. The act of living, deliberately, as myself.
We have made a quiet mistake about creativity, and psychology — the field that should know better — has not done enough to correct it.
The mistake is this: we have placed creativity at the top of the hierarchy and called it self-actualization, as though it were a reward for having successfully managed everything else first. Master your basic needs, secure your belonging, shore up your esteem — then, if you have margin left, you may create. You may orient yourself. You may become.
But this gets the architecture completely wrong.
Creativity is not decorative. It is not what you do with the leftover hours. It is how you navigate. It is how you make a map when no map exists, which is the condition of every actual human life. You cannot plan without imagination. You cannot build relationship without it — real relationship, the kind that requires you to hold another person's interiority as real and distinct from your own. You cannot grieve, adapt, forgive, or begin again without the generative capacity to envision something that does not yet exist.
This is not metaphor. This is what a mind does when it is functioning as a full human mind.
Creativity is not at the apex of the pyramid. It is load-bearing throughout. Remove it and the structure doesn't reach the top — it collapses in the middle. And when it collapses, people don't simply feel unfulfilled. They lose their way. They reach for whatever is closest to make the lostness stop. Some of them don't survive that reaching.
That is the stakes we are actually talking about. Not enrichment. Not flourishing as a bonus. Survival.
I want to call something out, and I want to do it directly.
The psychological community — researchers, clinicians, framework-builders — has spent more than a century mapping human suffering and human flourishing with extraordinary care and rigor. They have given us language for what we need, what wounds us, what allows us to grow. They have named addiction, dissociation, depression, despair. They have, in many cases, traced those things back to unmet needs — to lives lived without genuine agency, connection, or meaning.
And yet they have largely stopped short of the next sentence.
Because the next sentence is this: a culture that systematically denies people the conditions for creative self-authorship is not just failing them. It is harming them. It is producing, predictably and at scale, the very suffering the field then works to treat. And the silence around that — the acceptance of a cultural arrangement that rations the fullest version of a human life by class, by margin, by who can afford the long detour — is not neutrality. It is a position.
Who self-actualizes, practically speaking? Who has the time, the safety, the financial margin, the institutional permission to pursue orientation as a life's project? People with resources. People who can afford therapy, sabbaticals, education, the room to be lost for a while without losing everything. People for whom the dangerous shortcut is not the only door.
For everyone else, the implicit message from the culture — and too often from the field that should be pushing back against it — is: stabilize first. Function first. Contribute first. Then perhaps you may become.
Some people cannot wait that long. Some people are already at the door.
I expected more. From the people who know. I expected the field that named self-actualization to be loudly, persistently arguing that it belongs to everyone — not as aspiration, but as birthright. As a thing culture is obligated to protect and make possible, not merely permit for those who can afford it. I expected the researchers and clinicians who understand what a human being needs in order to truly live to be making that case in public, with urgency, with the full weight of what they know behind it.
The courage to say so has been, largely, missing.
Here is what I think is actually true:
Self-actualization is not a destination. It is not a tier you reach and then inhabit. It is a fabric — woven through every layer of a life, present in how you wash dishes and how you grieve and how you tell your child a hard thing and how you decide what to do with Tuesday. It is not separate from the daily. It is the daily, when the daily is lived with genuine contact between the person you are and the choices you are making.
Creativity is the thread that fabric is made of.
A culture that treats creativity as optional for most people is not merely aesthetically impoverished. It is producing unnecessary suffering. It is creating people who are adequately fed and housed and employed and utterly lost. Who cannot orient. Who cannot plan toward anything that is actually theirs. Who go through the motions of a life that was designed for them by forces they never examined, because no one told them that the examination was not a luxury — it was the work. And when the lostness becomes unbearable, when the need for self-authorship finds the only door available, we call what happens next a personal failing. A crisis. A tragedy.
It is a tragedy. But it is not only personal.
I know what it costs to do that work outside the scaffold, without cultural permission, against the quiet pressure of everyone who needs you to remain legible and manageable and where you were. I know what it costs the people who love you while you do it.
I also know what it gave me. Full ownership of my choices. Real accountability — not the performed kind, but the kind that comes from knowing that your life is genuinely yours and you are genuinely answerable for it. The strange, hard-won freedom of a journey that felt like mine. Contact with myself that I do not believe I could have reached any other way.
That is what creativity, taken seriously — as a need, as a right, as something culture is obligated to protect — can give a person.
The question I want to leave open is this: what would we have to build, and what would we have to stop pretending, to make that available to everyone before they reach the door?
I don't have a tidy answer. But I think the first step is saying clearly, and with some ferocity, that the current arrangement is a harm. That the people who know better have been too quiet. And that the lives lost in the gap between what we understand about human flourishing and what we have been willing to demand for it are not acceptable collateral.
They were people trying to find their way back to themselves.
We could have made that easier. We still could.