Nuanced Idealisation

For highly creative outliers with gifted cognition, there exists a unique challenge around idealisation in their interpersonal relationships. In addition to standard nodes of connection, such individuals also carry an existential-level layer of need in their personal relationships, one that is often never consciously requested but secretly lived in a near-obsessive cadence.

Idealisation, at its core, is the existential desire for cathartic, soul-tier inspiration, where the spirit pulsates and churns with overwhelm, to the point that art must be birthed due to the sheer compulsion to release that which pools, then overflows, from within. Thus, idealisation is a precursor to emotively gripping art and unbridled levels of deep, soulful devotion. However, while it is a neutral force in itself, it is equally spiritually violent in its intensity - a state that tends towards extremes, is deeply entrancing, addictive, and can become unintentionally corrosive when worshipped as an escape from reality. Without the anchoring friction of tactile, embodied living, they can easily be dragged into projecting, superimposing, and amplifying their idealised reality across their entire existence. Reality-imbuing is therefore a tempering skill that must be developed so that the riptide of idealisation does not drag them away.

In the context of intimate relationships, such individuals often bestow their chosen muse with generative devotional idealisation, founded upon meaningful admiration and deep respect. Within this inspiration lies the yearning for self-improvement, for inspiration is unintegrated admiration awaiting its own becoming. The muse, or the avatar that lives within the creative, becomes a transmutational conduit for their entropic, existential hunger to awaken their ability to imbue that which feels alive into their chosen art modality. Through their muse, they are better able to channel and weave the energetic signature of their soul’s cadence and spiritual devotion into their art, because the catalytic muse becomes a mechanism which can suspend them in this heightened emotive threshold state - one that makes the creative feel excruciatingly and euphorically alive. Simultaneously, when the desire to see their muse reach their inspired potential is so violently pure of heart, it becomes a spiritual motivator, an existential drive to create art so the world may see what they see in their muse, in hopes of bringing such a reality closer and inspiring the same in others.

However, the muse, in all their inherent beauty, is a human, a real person. And while the creative may sensorially experience their muse’s potential, they must equally realise the nuance within their noble intentions. Without mindful modulation, the avatar of the muse that exists within the creative will unknowingly drift and diverge into a mythic symbol of that which cannot be embodied, an impossible fantasy that never existed and never will in the flesh. For idealism, with all its deep desire for beauty, goodness, and seeing the best in others, is a close confidant of illusory perfection, and at times, can drift into becoming the latter. Noble intentions do not negate unintentional corrosion and can decay the connection when not anchored in that which can be lived. To love an avatar created and adored solely for the sake of the creative’s fantasy-driven inspiration is to worship a false idol of delusion, not an act of inspired appreciation.

While being seen both in their current incarnation and in their becoming can bring levity and incredible levels of self-belief in the muse, the muse must be seen through a human lens, for humans are messy, chaotic, and carry facets that never cross the threshold into that which is idealised. Drowning in the muse’s idealised becoming does not always honour the muse, due to the ever-crescendoing pressure for them to exist in a form that may not align with their soul’s calling.

The nuanced mastery of such a threshold state is a difficult yet delicate equilibrium to reach, strike, and sustain - one that the creative must consciously manage with cautious optimism. Too much reality, and the muse’s potential is not witnessed with sufficient inspiration for the creative to desire to stay, too much fantasy and the humble human nature of the muse is neither seen nor understood. Much like the concept of unconditional love, where the highest form of it through the human vessel will always contain a degree of boundary due to self-sovereignty - idealisation, no matter how strongly anchored in goodwill, always requires a degree of semi-detached objectivity in service of alignment. This enables the holding of both the muse’s inspired becoming and their organic incarnations, to wilfully see the uncomfortable as a counterbalancing force - and in doing so, the connection becomes a hybrid beauty, a sober idealised reality.

It is not that many creative outliers do not intuitively realise when they have drifted too far, they just feel torn between living the imperfect reality and lingering at an oscillating threshold state, indulging in the alluring call of that which can never be fully realised. Unclosed loops are pleasurably tormenting, yet deeply evocative raw material for the creation of psyche-scraping manifestations of art - such vicious longing is plagued with haunting, it offers their very spiritual jugular on the altar of creation, and the sacrificial element feels just as cathartic due to the inherent entropy. It is deeply addictive, for it breathes life into near-compulsive ruminations that pull them into a layer of reality no longer embodied, making them comb through every inkling of that which lives in their mind with a fine-toothed comb, almost like an addict licking the final glimmers of powdered wonderland - skinny-dipping in a decaying, decadent, dissonant dream.

The truth is, what such creatives fear most is existential numbness, for creative momentum breathes vibrancy into this need - thus they often mistake intense idealisation for true intimacy. But truly inspired intensity, tempered with moments of compassionate detachment and anchored in genuine resonance, does not dissipate - it embodies its own generative life force, it pulsates like a lively heart and contracts like lungs taking in fresh air, for sustainable creative momentum is living. Thus, the mastery of creation lies in having it serve coherence and the integration of reality - with all its crassness, pain, and ugliness - and absorbing and transmuting such into beauty, for to live in idealisation is not to honour the art of transmuting pain, but rather to engage in a metacognitively reframed escape from it.