"I'm Just Not Creative"

“I'm Just Not Creative”

….is a lament that I hear from a surprising number of successful adults who have demonstrated creativity in multiple areas of their lives, but are somehow unable to perceive how their gifts are manifesting themselves.

I blame this phenomenon partly on the undeserved mystique of the artist—this pervading idea that the world simply is made up of two different people-- gifted creative “types”, and the pragmatic, unimaginative sort who lack the ever-elusive Artist Gene.

Many of us were labeled, categorized, and filed away early in life. We were told that we were not artists because we didn't excel at drawing or activities that required spatial acuity. We were given up on if we didn't immediately demonstrate a “natural gift” for music, or singing, or dance. Even in art classes, neatness and accuracy was often valued over exuberance and expression. Many of us had talents and inclinations that simply went unrecognized, or were promptly shut down by adults.

And what didn't get shut down, we eventually learned to send into exile ourselves, after enough negative consequences were experienced as a result of our creative expression. For many of us, it's taken years and years to coax our artist out of the cave we banished it to, and begin to trust it again. Some of us still keep ours safely sealed in that darkness, and go on believing what we were told—that we are “just not creative.”

I also think that our culture's strange love-hate relationship with artists adds to this problem. We both venerate and mistrust artists. We've built up a powerful mythology about creative folk—that they are are incapable of linear thinking, that they are free-spirited, lazy, flakes, that they are eccentric and unable to manage adult life, and that they somehow simultaneously live in genteel poverty, yet must have been born into wealth in order to have the luxury to cultivate their mysterious gift. Some of us feel that if we talk about our creativity, we'll be labeled negatively, or regarded as a fringe element.

When artists are separated from the culture at large and held up as the Other, it only serves to further alienate us from our own creative force. And this myth of the artist as other is often cultivated by artists themselves, who can easily begin to believe in their own hype and “specialness”.

I believe that everyone is a creative type. In fact, I believe that it's impossible not to be creative. And I believe that each one of us has the potential to heal whatever wounds were inflicted on our inner artists and move into a greater fullness of expression.

It's a path that I walk every day; slowly learning to open up, to drown out the voices from my childhood that still echo in me: stupid, lazy, sloppy, worthless; don't try it, don't say that, you can't, you can't, you can't. The voices that for almost 40 years managed to keep me from writing. The voices that grow weaker and more powerless as I take more and more risks.

In the Spring, I will be teaching a series of workshops through the King County Libraries entitled, “I'm Just Not Creative!” This is a gentle but direct challenge to any of you who still believe this about yourselves. Don't worry; we'll walk through it together, sharing our fears. I'm holding intention for it be accepting, playful, warm, and fun. And you will leave with a piece of art that you can tack up on your bulletin board and gaze at every time you begin to think that you are not capable of creating anything.