Creative people tend to suffer from self-doubt, some more than others. Here's my little story on the subject.

It is 3 AM. Insomnia strikes again. My chest aches with a profound angst as I am consumed with the thought "Why do I write music?" These little black dots seem so pointless. Futile. I should have been a farmer.

Yet the next morning I wake up groggy but happy to get back to my manuscript paper and composition is the only thing that matters, thoughts of dirt and manure being the furthest from my mind.

So why is music so important to me when it seems to serve no real purpose? Ravel called music a "divertissement de luxe" a "useless occupation", which doesn't help my sleeplesness at all. However, I did receive some help understanding my need for music from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, speaking through his famous sleuth, Sherlock Holmes:

"Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from flowers."

It is clear that the rose was a metaphor for "divertissements de luxe" such as detective stories and, of course, music. I remember reading this and feeling in my bones that this was the Truth.

So now, when I wake at 3 AM, I'll push away my doubts with thoughts of beautiful useless flowers and get right back to sleep.