My Creativity Was Inhibited Until a Childhood Fear Inspired Me

How a childhood fear became symbolic of a creative life twenty years later

I was afraid of a lot of things as a kid: drowning, raccoons, kidnappers, and, once a year, a bell named Michael.

I lived for a while at a theological seminary. Outside our Gothic Revival chapel stood a structure that housed a hundred-year-old bell known as “Michael the Bell.” Every day I heard Michael ring for morning and evening prayer across the campus.

The night before Easter, we attended the Easter Vigil held in the chapel. I loved that service with the chanted liturgy in the flickering candlelight. I breathed in the fragrant incense which hung heavy in the air. Handbells chimed with each “Alleluia!” in the Easter hymns. I had brought my loudest bell from home, and I shook it as hard as my little hand could. The service ended after the stars were shining, long after my bedtime.

After the service, we’d step out into the chilly night. The kids would run to line up outside the bell tower. It was the one day of the year that kids were allowed to take rides on Michael. A kid would hang on tightly to the rope, and a seminarian would heave down on the heavy rope. Michael the Bell pealed, and the kid would be lifted high over our heads.

I was terrified to ride the bell rope.

I stood and watched, letting other kids go ahead. Kids disappeared into the darkness of the unlit tower before bobbing back down, and up again. There was nothing to stop you from falling except your own grip on an old rope. Somehow this didn’t bother anyone but me. A dozen kids and their parents were apparently fine with it. The other kids squealed and shrieked with glee and made me feel that I was missing out. I never took my turn.

I was disappointed in myself, shamed by my fear.

Twenty years later, after I returned to college as a “mature” student, I was taking an interdisciplinary course at university called Women and Creativity.

One creative writing assignment was to write a short story in which you are the main character, and you adopt Creativity, as though it were a living being that you were inviting into your home to be nurtured by you.

I hadn’t thought about Michael the Bell in years. But suddenly, as I wrote the story, there it was in the forefront of my thoughts.

After my character adopted Creativity in the story, my character was inspired to paint a portrait of myself as a woman, hanging on to the rope and soaring up in the bell tower. I was naked in the portrait, unfettered, unafraid. I rose high, but instead of being surrounded by darkness, light streamed through the tower.

In my fictional portrait, I reimagined my experience. I soared. Not literally in space, but creatively. I lifted off from the ground, unbound by inhibitions and self-criticism, and self-doubt.

If I actually had any visual art skills, I would have painted the portrait in real life. I can’t draw or paint though. It was a fictional short story. It’s enough for me that the painting exists in my mind as a reminder to nurture creativity and live free from fear. Not fear of physical dangers like falling from a rope, but rather, the fear of not being good enough or talented enough. The fear which, if I let it, would lash my creativity down and keep it grounded on the earth.

Instead, I let my creativity soar.