In The Sickness Unto Death, Søren Kierkegaard defines despair as a sickness of the self/spirit caused by an imbalance in the self’s relation to itself, and hence, the self’s relation to the power that institutes it as a relation between body and soul: God.

What if despair is a matter of the self, but emerges out of an inability to express one’s condition through available means, not an imbalance in a relation, as Kierkegaard says?

Despair is then a longing – an anticipation – of creativity, or more precisely, creation: a means to express one’s condition through a new mode, alien to the previously existing set of possibilities.

Hence, for example, we have art, song, or performance, all means of expressing something in a way that breaks convention, all things that strike us first when we think of ‘creativity’.

But does this take on despair relate to Kierkegaard’s? If so, how?