TED: Eat, Pray, Love Author [Elizabeth Gilbert] on How We Kill Geniuses | Epicenter from Wired.comGilbert achieved unexpected attention when her book was published a couple of years ago. And this was all very nice, except, since then, everyone has been wondering how she’ll ever top her achievement, as if it’s all downhill from here.
“Everywhere I go now people treat me like I’m doomed,” she said. She thought about how creative people have a reputation for being mentally unstable, which she attributes to pressure to perform and live up to expectations for brilliance from themselves as well as the world.
“Allowing somebody … to believe that he or she is … the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, internal mystery is just like a smidge of too much responsibility to put on one fragile human psyche,” she said. “It’s like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all of these unnatural expectations about performance. I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.”
