Allen C. Paul | Founder, God and Gigs (00:02)
So this is one of those episodes that I didn't want to script an intro to. I always try to make sure on the God and Gigs show, and if you're new to the show, by the way, thank you for joining me. My name is Allen C. Paul. I wanted to be very honest and open because as I was sharing the recording that this episode is taken from, I was not feeling the best. I was not at 100%. And some of you in the God and Gigs community know that we went through a recent really tough time with a loss in my family.
It's very hard to be vulnerable and at the same time not feel like you're using or taking advantage of a situation in your personal life to try to either promote yourself or get views or somehow become kind of like the poster child for sympathy. That's not the goal here, but it is a goal to show you how I actively try to walk through a really tough situation while still being a creator and leading a community. So.
That's what this episode is about. It's about how you manage being down, distressed and dealing with emotional and mental health struggles while still trying to stay connected to your life, your calling, your creative gift. And when you need to take a step back and how to kind of navigate as you walk through something like that. I just wanted to give you my own example so that you could also have that support if and when you need that kind of guidance.
Here's a portion of that talk that we had on our Creator Checkup on how I navigated dealing with some personal issues while still trying to stay connected to my creative calling.
Allen C. Paul - God And Gigs (01:38)
If you are a creator in any area, whether it be music, art, film, writing, whatever it is, you're going to realize that life happens. And as it does to all of us, I don't want to make myself,
A victim or sob story or look for sympathy. It's just the truth of what happened and I figured this is the best way for me to use myself as a test case on how things can go, you know, not wrong, but go south and how to fix it and how to continue your creator business. Even in the midst of dealing with your emotional and mental health.
and family struggles, which we all go through.
because I think one of the things that we forget as creators is that you cannot simply perform, create, or use art as your
healing mechanism. Art itself can be very healing for the both the producer and the consumer of the art. But at the end of the day, your emotional health cannot be dependent on your creative output.
I do find God and connect with God through my art, through my music. There have been times I've sat at the piano, tears in my eyes, two o'clock in the morning, and I just knew that he was using the very music that I was playing to help me heal, to help get connected with him. But again, the reason why that worked is because I was pouring out my heart in the honest space that I was in, not simply trying to make a song to make me feel better.
And I think the difference with producing art to heal and producing art to mask is what's the goal? If your goal is to somehow use the music, to use the painting, to use it as kind of like a distraction from your pain, from your mental health, from your emotional pain.
If it's a distraction, it's actually doing you a disservice and not working in your behalf. The only thing that the Bible says that really heals these types of things, if you are struggling, come unto me, you're weary and heavy-leaded and I will give you rest. So that's proximity to God. Prayer, because the Bible says that the effectual fervent prayer of the righteous avail of much, right? The King James Version.
Prayer is clearly a way that you get that connecting with other people the people that you are loving and the love that love you and love God and want to help you and bless you the community of Christians a community of faith focused believers a community of artists that understand that That's where healing comes in. Okay? Again, I'll quote a scripture Galatians says confess your faults to one another that you might be healed
That's a specific spiritual principle that is a ⁓ healing remedy for your emotional health, your mental health. And of course, again, when I say the community, that also includes professionals, mental health counselors, all those people that includes the discussion, the talking, the being open about your feelings, the being open about what you're actually going through. All of these things are actual things that will help you.
to overcome those mental health and emotional health challenges. What we can't do as creators is try to make up for it by simply creating more. Our output, again, can be based out of our need to express ourselves, but it can't replace your need to express yourself to other people in your community, other mental health and emotional health professionals.
and being honest about where you are. My goal in me sharing even this week when I felt like maybe I could take another week off, I probably could have or should have taken a couple more weeks before I try to get back into content creation. But I realized that if I'm going through this, there are other people going through this and there's definitely ebbs and flows. I've seen this with so many of my creative friends in our creative community, musician friends who are going through some tough financial.
financial difficulties, to family difficulties. Like, you want to unplug entirely and you can't. Not entirely. So how do you push through? What's the right level of capacity? I think what I'm trying to demonstrate is that your capacity, again, cannot exceed your emotional health. The importance of emotional health is that is the lid of which you kind of create from.
And while your emotional health might be down, it doesn't mean that you have to give up creating. It just means you have to be honest about what's going to be very, ⁓ it's not going to be the full cup. I heard ⁓ our newest guest, that will be coming up soon. I just interviewed her and I saw a reel that she shared. I'll go ahead tell you who she is because I want you to make sure you're ready for her interview to come out.
It's a, her name is Vanessia Darby and she poured or she talked about pouring from an empty cup and her comment was actually kind of striking. She said, it's not even that you can't pour from an empty cup. She's like, you should be pouring from the overflow and the cup should be full all the time. That was a revolutionary statement for me because I've always heard that you just need to refill the cup, but you're pouring out for other people.
But her statement was the cup should be full and the overflow should be for other people. Now that again seems to be, that can be really tough because you may not see how you could refill so fast when you always feel empty emotionally. But I think again, the honesty is what matters. Being honest about the fact that you feel empty.
being honest about the fact that you don't feel like you have it all together. Like, I'll be honest with you, even as I'm looking at the clock on this particular livestream, I'm like, do I have an hour in me today? Maybe not, and that's okay. If there's people that watch this later and they're like, man, Allen, you were off at the beginning, like you were just all over the place. Like, yeah, that's the truth, that's the honesty that can come through your art and your creative work if you can.
Face yourself and say my emotional health matters more than my creative output my honesty and authenticity about that when you don't have it and being able to push through to the level that you can but not trying to do more than you can I think is where the real honesty and authenticity comes in. So I wanted to be again kind of be the test case be the case study on Coming back from a traumatic event
Deciding whether or not you have the capacity to share and knowing how much you can share So I felt this was the right thing to do for a community I felt like it would resonate and I definitely thank you for all of you guys who have reached out and prayed and said how are you really doing like that was probably the most biggest blessing of Seeing how the community responded to when I said hey, we're going through some stuff
The fact that the community really wanted to know, how are you really doing? They didn't say when's the next podcast coming out. They didn't have any of those questions. They just wanted to know, Hey, what's really going on? How are you really feeling? So that was a blessing. So that fact that I know that you guys actually cared about my, my mental health, my emotional health means the world to me. And it absolutely means as I saw again, some people comment on Instagram.
that their number was super low, it means that I need to do more checking up on you guys as well. And that's the importance of the mental health that we as a community check on each other and don't expect our creative output to outpace or to replace our ability to connect with God and with each other in our journey through this life and dealing with life as it comes.
