When we think about feeling negative feelings, such as sadness, anxiety, or frustration, the first thing that comes to our mind is usually discomfort or the urge to escape. These emotions are often associated with pain, vulnerability, or a sense of being out of control, so our instinct is to avoid them or suppress them.
However, beneath layers of pain lies a rich emotional landscape – one that pushes us toward deeper reflection, self-awareness, and creative transformation. These feelings signal that something within us or our environment needs attention, change, or expression. That’s why, although they are unpleasant, they often serve as doorways to insight, growth, and powerful creative output.
Our creativity can indeed emerge from multiple origins, both negative and positive. The psychologist Milene Aragão explains what happens to our brain when under the influence of negative emotions:
“Creativity has multiple origins. Among them, negative feelings. When it arises from pain, it can be a form of mental elaboration that, in psychoanalysis, we call sublimation. It involves transforming suffering into something thinkable and productive. We can imagine this process as a psychic digestion: something raw and difficult is transformed into substances that nourish and heal. Pain, then, becomes poetry, music, art. It feeds the mind of those who create it — and those who receive it.”
The living proof of this is the many writers, musicians, painters, and artists who channeled their negative feelings into art. A classic example is the painting The Scream, where Edward Munch portrays his anxiety and exhaustion, using the colors to express the intensity of his feelings. And that sometimes, words fail to explain.
Even now, many singers admit that the inspiration for a new album or song might be a bad experience. The Japanese-American singer Mitski is the perfect example of that. In her song “Nobody”, a disco-pop love song about solitude, she talks about estrangement and being by yourself while everybody is having fun. In an interview, Mistki explained to Genius what inspired her to write this song:
“I had just finished my Asia and Australia tour… I went to Malaysia, where I spent a lot of my childhood and I thought it would be great, like finally get to decompress, except I didn’t prepare for how fricking lonely it would be to just be all alone in a country where no one knows me, while everyone else I know is having holiday’s with their family and friends. I was also really tired and just the idea of everybody I know being in a different time zone and having holidays without me – it was just a combination of a lot of things.”
At the deep end, we can see that feeling lonely, sad, or anxious isn’t bad or wrong. What makes us sick is when we can’t think about them. And what heals, often, is when we find something that helps to give shape to the chaos inside us.
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The article above was edited by Clarissa Palácio.
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