Maybe You Don't Need to Find Your Creativity
Maybe you don't need to find your creativity. Maybe you just need to use it.
That thought has been rattling around in my brain for weeks now, bumping into the coffee mugs and tripping over the 10 pairs of sandals I leave all over the house, because I hear some version of the same thing on repeat: I used to be so creative. I don't know what happened. I wouldn't even know where to start now. We talk about creativity like it's a set of keys we misplaced somewhere between carpool and the grocery list - like somewhere out there is a slightly younger, less tired version of us still holding onto it, and if we could just retrace our steps we'd find her.
But after seventeen years of teaching art to actual children, which, if you've never done it, is a bit like herding glitter, I'm starting to think we have this whole thing backward.
Before we learned to be good at it
Hand a five-year-old a crayon and a blank piece of paper and just watch. They don't sit there sizing up the paper like it owes them something. They don't wonder if this is a productive use of nap time. They just start. Scribbles. Circles. A person with arms sprouting directly out of their head, announced with the complete, unbothered confidence of someone who has never once been wrong in their life — "that's my mom." The sun can be purple. The dog can be the size of a minivan. The whole page can be one giant looping line that apparently tells a very long and very important story, one only they can hear. And none of it bothers them one bit.
They don't need to know what it's going to be before they start it. They don't ask what they'll do with it when it's done. They simply make the next mark, and then the one after that. Pools of color bring such joy! I couldn't keep enough supplies in the house for my Luke when he was young.
Now, don’t get me wrong, kids can absolutely get self-conscious too, especially as they near high school. I watched it happen plenty of times: that exact moment where a kid looks over at the paper next to theirs and quietly decides they're "not as good as." One of my former students even used humor to cover some ot that insecurity, which, honestly was brilliant. But there's something about how we, as adults, begin that's different.
Making starts out as play. And somewhere along the way, a lot of us slowly, sneakily turn it into a performance review. We learn that there's a right way to do it. We learn to compare our purple sun to somebody else's yellow one. We decide some people are the artistic ones and some people just aren't, and we quietly put ourselves in the second group. Eventually it just gets easier not to make anything at all.
A message that stopped me mid-scroll
Yesterday I got a message from the mom of one of my former students. She was telling me about her daughter making art, playing with color, cutting things up just because and there was one word in there that stopped me cold. PLAY
Because that's exactly what's been living in my head lately. Kids know how to play with creativity long before anyone teaches them to judge it. They pick up the crayon. They mix the colors that aren't supposed to go together. They cut the paper crooked on purpose. They make the weird thing, and then — this is the important part — they make another weird thing right after it, no debrief required. Meanwhile we grown-ups can sit in front of the most gorgeous pile of art supplies known to humankind and think, I have absolutely no idea what to make. Or worse, the quieter, meaner one: I guess I'm just not creative anymore.
But what if you are? What if that part of you never actually left the building? What if she's just... been sitting very quietly in the back, waiting for someone to notice she's still there?
Maybe we've got the order backwards
I think a lot of us are waiting to feel creative before we let ourselves create. We wait for inspiration to knock politely. We wait for the idea to arrive fully formed. We wait until the house is clean and the inbox is empty and the stars have aligned into that one magical Tuesday where we finally feel like "a creative person" again. But kids don't become creative and then start scribbling. They scribble first. And it's in the scribbling that they find out what they were even trying to say.
Maybe there's something in that for us too. Maybe you don't have to find your creativity before you use it, maybe using it is how you find your way back to her.
And "using it" doesn't have to mean sitting down to produce a finished, framed, Instagram-caption-ready masterpiece. It can be picking two colors just because you like how they look sitting next to each other. Tearing paper for no good reason. Drawing circles. Scribbling. Cutting something apart and gluing it back together wrong on purpose. Pushing scraps around a page like you're arranging furniture you're not sure you'll keep. Making marks with absolutely zero idea what they're supposed to become. Let's just noodle and see what shows up.
Ten minutes counts. Fifteen minutes counts. Something you make and then immediately throw away still counts. Something nobody on this earth will ever see still counts. Because maybe the point was never really about what you made. Maybe the whole point, every time, was just that you made.
Go ahead. Make a mark.
I don't think the way back is trying to become the exact creative person you were twenty or forty years ago. I'm not who I was thirty years ago either, and if I'm honest, I don't really want to be — she had great hair but truly terrible instincts. Maybe instead we give the women we are right now some of that same permission we once handed that little girl holding the crayon. You don't have to know what it's going to become. You don't have to be good at it. You don't have to show a single soul. You don't even have to finish it.
Just begin. Go ahead and make a mark, and see what happens. I have a hunch your creativity never left. I think she's just been waiting for you to pick the pencil back up.
xo, Amy