When being an artist means sharing the very essence of yourself with the world, losing sight of your identity can feel catastrophic.
In 2016, Marina Diamandis, at the time going by the moniker Marina and the Diamonds, felt like she had lost her true self and her love for music along with it. Marina's music before her hiatus had frequently employed criticisms of the Hollywood machine, how it tore artists down to remold them into a more popular and palatable image, and now she herself was facing those intense external pressures. As she put it in an interview with Mark Savage for the BBC,
I had such a fractured sense of who I was because so much of my identity was attached to music - and if I didn't want to do that any more, then what can I contribute to the world? What am I good at? What's my purpose? What makes me feel happy?...I just didn't know. I had no idea. (2019)
In The Creative Act, A Way of Being, Rubin (2023) discusses how a creative might remedy incessant outside voices that become so internalized that they affect an artist's self-expression. In "Tuning Out (Undermining Voices)," Rubin says,
Any pressure you feel around the work - from the inside or outside - is a signal for self-examination. The artist's goal is to keep themselves pure and unattached. To avoid letting stress, responsibility, fear, and dependence on a particular outcome distract. And if it does, it's never too late to reset. (p. 255)
So, Marina went on hiatus in an effort to rediscover her identity and what it meant to truly be herself. One major step she took with this goal in mind was to drop "and the Diamonds" from her moniker, simply going by her name: Marina. Although many fans did not like this at all (as "and the Diamonds" was taken to mean her fanbase), she saw it as a way to draw appropriate boundaries between herself and her fans, to not "give them any illusion that they have any kind of entitlement" (Dazed Magazine, 2019). In doing so, she created a healthy sense of detachment from herself and the fans that consume her work, instead of letting outside pressure consume her.
One might expect that an artist going on hiatus is using all of those years as a creative retreat to create their next big thing. For Marina, a large part of her hiatus was abandoning music entirely. Instead, she chose to study psychology at Birkbeck University of London. Ironically, this clean break from music was the key to rediscovering peace within herself. Those years spent studying became meditative, and she realized that "once [she] allowed [herself] to quit, [she] felt like [she] opened up inside" (Savage, 2019).
Rubin (2023) writes about experiences similar to Marina's discovery in "Right Before Our Eyes." In this chapter, he encourages the reader to "think of an artistic impasse as another type of creation," and to surrender to that blockage instead of trying to think their way out of it. He reasons that, "Each time we surrender, we may come to find that the answer we seek is right before our eyes" (p. 263-264).
Such was Marina's experience with her hiatus, and in 2019, she returned to the music scene with her album "Love + Fear." Influence from her hiatus is strong in this album, particularly in the theme of the album itself, inspired by this quote from Swiss psychologist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross: "All positive emotions come from love, all negative emotions from fear…there is only love or fear. For we cannot feel these two emotions together at exactly the same time" (Kaplan, 2019). One song in particular, Handmade Heaven, references her past acceptance that she had to step away from music, and I think it is important to recognize that this song was not on the "Fear" part of the album, but rather part of "Love." By letting go, she learned to trust in herself and the strength of her identity, fully embodying Rubin's ideas of letting the boundless creativity of the universe flow through us and embolden us.
"I could no longer ignore / The ivy growing tall / This life don't suit me anymore / The writing's on the wall"
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