"If I didn’t have to live," Francis Bacon once said of his compulsive, disturbing yet masterful art, "I wouldn’t let any of this out." Bacon's connection directly reinforces Rollo May's philosophy of existence: “We express our being by creating.”

Rollo May (April 21, 1909 – October 22, 1994) was an American existential psychologist who practiced a philosophical therapy method based on the concept of being. May's 1975 work, The Courage to Create, is a seminal study of fear's debilitating aspects and the creative life's self-fulfillment.

"Study for a Portrait" by Francis Bacon, 1952, Bacon's distortion of an unnamed man in a suit is also entitled "Businessman." Learn more.

The beginning of this fear, argues May, is that creativity requires abandoning processes, habits, and even society.

The greatness of a poem or a painting is not that it portrays the thing observed or experienced but that it portrays the artist's or the poet's vision cued off by his encounter with the reality. Hence the poem or the painting is unique, original, never to be duplicated.   May echoes something written by German critic Walter Benjamin in the latter's essay "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Benjamin essentially concluded that art cannot be separated from its place, time, and culture of creation.  
I prefer art that shows the existence of the creator. Ceramics, for example, will include marks and rubs of the artist, intentional or not. To me, the act of creation is more instrumental to what I think of as "art" than the aesthetics.

Consequently, this separation brings conflicting results like disorientation and even alienation—what thespian Anna Deavere Smith called "an excruciating sense of aloneness."

In this isolation, we form both art and ourselves. May continues:

The self is made up, on its growing edge, of the models, forms, metaphors, myths, and all other kinds of psychic content that give it direction in its self-creation. This is a process that goes on continuously.

"Brick Man" by Max Jacquard, 2002. According to the artist, the glass figure signifies the fragile, isolated, constructed semblance of the artist's ego. Learn more.

Disorienting acts not only develop the self. May believes they function as the beginning of the creative process, "for the creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them."   Many believed that isolation best enables this struggle, from poet Rupi Kaur, who advises "love your isolation," to journalist Sylvain Tesson, who fled to Siberia to escape "15 kinds of ketchup."Away from the dirge of society, what Mary Oliver called "the world's busyness," we are able to focus on the inner processes that make art—and self—possible.  
Read more in my compilation Nighttime Activities Done in Solitude in and van Gogh's private letters, which urged us to "go forth quietly."

Creative writing teacher Dorothea Brande thought similarly that distraction and tension could reinforce each other to spark ideas and, like May, that understanding our fears is the first move in dismantling them.

At such times we face the danger of losing our orientation, the danger of complete isolation. Will we lose our accepted language, which makes communication possible in a shared world? Will we lose the boundaries that enable us to orient ourselves to what we call reality?

May also promotes a balance between work, rest, and play, noting that our emotional well-being (and emotional intelligence) influences thinking, a thought echoed by choreographer Twyla Tharp, who creates a space of nurturing warmth in which to work.

Consider Patti Smith's small spindling of words written from the depths of melancholy:

Everything contained in this little book is true and written just like it was. The writing of it drew me from my strange torpor and I hope that in some measure it will fill the reader with vague and curious joy.
From Patti Smith's Woolgathering

Those who create do not abandon fear but exist within fear. This emotional self-nourishment matters, according to May, because the courage to create comes from moving forward despite doubt. Push through despite the existential boundaries of our craft: that we will die, that we will not achieve our full potential, that we might never be seen, and it will all be for naught.   I cannot think of a single narrative of creativity that does not include some measure of mobilized fear. From Dorothy Parker's quiet wonder if anyone would notice if she simply stopped working to comedian John Cleese noting how nail-biting it is to sit all day and produce nothing.  
C. S. Lewis once wrote about the physical nature of grief, how it felt in his body. The fear of creating gives me shoulder aches, gut pain, restless legs. Essayist and mapper of the human consciousness, Durga Chew-Bose, wrote about "nausea of producing nothing."
If you have felt creative fear, shame, even critical, psychological abandon, The Courage to Create will give you a warm pulse of energy to mobilize those feelings into something.

Creativity is a yearning for immortality. We human beings know that we must die. We have, strangely enough, a word for death. We know each of us must develop the courage to confront death. Yet we also must rebel and struggle against it. Creativity comes from this struggle.

May's wisdom on courage and fear has inspired many creatives and is critical to anyone who longs to "express their being."   Psychologist Irvin D. Yalom was a mentee of May, and in Yalom's book about death anxiety he references the personal influence of May's work: "Dedicated to my mentors," wrote Yalom, including May, "Who ripple through me to my readers."  
Confronting our death anxiety is critical to courage. May draws on the poetry of Marianne Moore:  
"After considering death and how we can confront it, she ends her poem:  
'So he who strongly feels, behaves. The very bird, grown taller as he sings, steels his form straight up. Though he is captive, his mighty singing says, satisfaction is a lowly thing, how pure thing is joy. This is mortality, this is eternity.'"  
For more on our battle to extend ourselves beyond mortality, read my compilation A Singular Focus on the Eternal. 

For more on the courage to create—specifically, the totality of creative alienation—read Vincent van Gogh's letters to his beloved brother. Additionally, John Steinbeck's Working Days is a fiercely honest account of how shattered emotional well-being affects the creative mind. And, of course, Rilke's essential words of patience, wisdom, and warning bolster any vulnerable creative.