Larry--

I think you misunderstood what I said about creativity. That, and I may not have explained it very well, and that little paragraph was attempting to address one of John's comments on creativity, not the suffer or not to suffer debate. He'd said something about creative people being introverted, and I know a lot of fairly extroverted people who are creative. I think it's hard to generalize about qualities creative people might have in common. The creative people I know and have known seem to be very different from each other, but it does seem to me that at least among the most creative people I've known they've shared a certain sense of quirkiness and, I have to say, weirdness.

I suspect creativity has very little to do with whether a person suffers or not. Creativity is just one element in an artist's makeup. An artist is not an artist because of "that special something called creativity" but because of a strong need to express him or herself through the art.

Most people fight to keep their fears and anxieties tucked away into subconsciousness, but artists struggle to confront them, to peel away layers of their psyches in order to better understand themselves and the human condition, and this process is necessarily a painful one.

Whatever lies beneath the surface of things is considered to lie beneath the surface because it's hidden. Therefore, it's not immediately apparent, so that a person can't just look and see it because it's there, because what the casual looker would see would be what is on the surface. An artist needs to explore and discover what is there and in so doing experiences it, which is painful. If these things beneath the surface were not disturbing, they wouldn't be there.

Incidentally, if I ever do apply for another job in the business world, I will be sure to leave my opinions on creativity off my resume.