#53: The capacity to create your life.
We all have it, whether or not we own it.
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Like a Vespa hooked up to a Tesla Supercharger, I’m buzzing with the high-voltage current of New Orleans.
The remnants of Halloween are in the air, and the city’s creative wackiness is on full display.
As I guffaw at the all-out decorations, I can’t help but feel some envy. The residents of New Orleans seem to have figured out the secret to fully embracing their creativity — something I still struggle to do.
Almost a year into this Luminist journey and I still cannot say I am creative or creating. I choke on those words. And a writer? Actually tell people that I am a writer?! Preposterous!
It’s so strange… I don’t have imposter syndrome in any other area of my life. I’m a badass female exec in a male-dominated industry and I love what I do, the mission we serve, and the people around me. I’m confident, powerful, and able to admit when I screw up. I’m not ‘impostering’ anything! I am 100% the real deal.
And while sitting safely in my cushy corporate chair, I realize I have done some pretty creative things. I started a women’s summit at my company from scratch. I led the effort to re-name and re-brand my company after a merger, complete with annoying questions on fonts and color schemes. I even co-designed a gorgeous Treehouse with my architect Robert as a haven and nest for me and my little family.
My inability to call myself creative is extra frustrating because this is now the third time I’ve attempted to bust through this imaginary wall.
(If you’re interested, you can read more about the creative act of simply living and the little heroism of creating).
Why am I so damn resistant to owning this undeniable fact — I’ve spent at least ten hours a week for 52 weeks writing.
And why do I care so much about me and creativity in the first place…?
I recently read a book I thought had nothing to do with creativity.
I picked up Look by Christian Madsbjerg because I’ve always been drawn to the act of observation. So much so that I wanted to be an anthropologist when I was young.
There I was, happily nodding along as Madsbjerg expounded on the benefits of observation — “all activity is meaningless if you don’t have an actual insight to guide your efforts” — when he whacked me with a curve ball.
“Insights are the necessary platform for any worthwhile invention or innovation. Once you begin to have insights, you immediately recognize that coming up with new ideas, technologies, or solutions has very little to do with creativity. Instead, everything starts with the insight, and what follows is logical and obvious given what an insight has revealed to you. Innovation and invention are possible — inevitable, really — once you arrive at an insight.”
Creativity isn’t magic, it’s just observation, hidden behind a curtain.
It has nothing to do with having a mysterious, highly-sought-after X factor. It’s not just for a select few, who were either born lucky or trained extensively. So it doesn’t really matter if I identify as “creative” or not. I still have the capacity. We all do.
For most of my adult life, I rarely thought about my own creativity.
It just didn’t seem applicable to my goals or my life. I have always loved art museums, but for me, creativity was purely a spectator sport.
Until a force like an avalanche thundering down a Rocky Mountain pass started vibrating through my body. A force based on the hard-earned insights I’d gained as a widow — there was more to life after loss! It could be vibrant and fulfilling! Holy cow, everyone needed to know this! The insight was a hot potato, and I had to find a way to pass it around.
Which reminds me of another major moment when I was forced to come up with creative solutions: when I found myself as a single parent to two grieving pre-teens.
This probably shows how little I know about creativity, but I always thought it ended in some tangible piece of art: a painting, poem, song, play, dance performance, puppet show performed by eight-year-olds.
But maybe that’s defining art too narrowly.
Maybe the type of existence that I’m so in love with — which I describe with insufficient words like vibrant and technicolor and pulsing with aliveness — is actually best described as art too. It is, after all, thinking outside of the box to create something magnetic and immersive and moving… where there was only the raw material of “something has to change” before.
We love to look at impressive people around us and think, “I could never do that.”
That’s how I feel about the writers and painters and musicians that inspire me.
I’m just a regular earthling banging my head against an iPad while they’re superhuman aliens, exploring the Milky Way through the mystical act of creation. I could never.
But “othering” people we look up to — along with the work that they do — is selling both them and us short. They are regular earthlings too, they have just devoted a massive amount of time and effort to their craft. Their ability to create isn’t a superpower we could only dream of receiving, like an acceptance letter to Hogwarts.
But believing it is means that we, the normal people, don’t even try.
To some people, I might seem like a superhuman alien. I somehow got the X factor that allowed me to turn Mike’s death into a redemption story for myself and my family. Mere earthlings don’t have a chance at doing what I’ve done.
But I thought I was an earthling too! I was just stubborn and desperate enough to try anyway. To try when I didn’t even believe. To allow my observations to form my expectations, not the other way around. To look beyond the grief pit in my chest and learn from this world that continues, always continues, after endless loss. To imagine a new path, and then create a new path, rather than accepting the dismal one I was pointed down. (I’m going to go into more depth on this next Saturday!)
Turns out taking the mental leap from “this is just the way things are for me” to “oh the hell with it, I’m going to at least try to turn this boat around” is the hardest part.
Just because I don’t identify as a creative doesn’t mean I can’t create a weekly newsletter that has attracted almost 800 subscribers. And just because you don’t identify as [strong, resilient, empowered, fill in the blank], doesn’t mean you can’t do [strong, resilient, empowered, fill in the blank] things.
We just have to be crazy enough to try anyway.
Creative or not, here I go,
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If you resonated with this post and want more, check out these:
#20: An ode to the reader’s creative act. I don’t want an audience. I want a cohort of co-creators.
#27: Exceeding your own expectations. How my grieving teenagers became my empowerment gurus.
#32: I think I can. I think I can. I think I can. It’s time to rewrite, and rewire, the narrative of suffering and struggle.
#46: It’s all possible now. Awakening to freedom at the top of the world.
#51: Choosing the road less traveled. A life of your own is worth the unknown.
This really screamed at me. I have been blocked as a writer for 11 months and I wondered why. I stopped looking at the world and observing when my wife got real sick. I am so glad that you wrote this. David Brooks said in an interview that great writers are observers. Thank You.
Thank you Sue! The power of observation! It is making me think of our son , and everyone else in our family. For Scott being non verbal, he is a constant observantist!, new word!
For my whole family I pray this week they will observe and create a better life, world, etc, for themselves and others!