sadgrl

I would consider my younger self creative. My current self? Not so much. I feel like I lost touch with my creativity sometime after college. I wonder if being in a school setting and always learning different things makes that whole process easier. I still learn every day at work, but it’s different. I don’t even get to write essays (although I am a pro at apologizing for the length of my emails).

After settling down and figuring out how best to manage a consistent day job with evenings and weekends off, I focused my energy on getting lost in the ideas of others. It’s almost like I dissociate while watching a movie or playing a game, so I can truly have the experience of being someone else without having to be weighed down by my own consciousness.

Still, I wouldn’t really say I’ve ever dedicated myself to ‘restoring’ my creativity, but that’s because until recently I didn’t think it could be restored. I’ve tried all sorts of “tips and tricks” (and books, and courses) for getting in touch with your creativity and overcoming writer’s block but they didn’t do anything for me. I wrote myself off as a lost cause (my specialty).

I don’t know how this slipped my mind but it was when I came across the phrase “creativity is a muscle” (and a bunch of angry commenters saying THAT’S WRONG, NOT -ACTUALLY- A MUSCLE) that it all started feeling a lot more hopeful. It’s a muscle in the sense that, if you don’t exercise those parts of your brain regularly, they will become less active.

It’s hard to conceptualize creativity as a part of myself, and even harder to measure it. I found a measure that I’m pretty comfortable with using: ideas. I ask myself, “How many ideas do I have that make me want to create?” This is the measure I am using. In the beginning, it was a struggle. I couldn’t think of anything that seemed worth writing about for days. I had loose “ideas” but they only sounded good, they didn’t trigger any kind of creative association in my mind. I kept experimenting with “creative exercises” until I tried something new. A self-interview. I would open a document and write questions that I wanted to explore or learn the answer to (this is especially good for introspective stuff). I answered them as honestly and thoroughly as possible.

I started super basic with questions like, “Describe how it feels to be blocked” and “What would it look like if you were un-blocked?” When I’m in the middle of answering a question, something within my answer will stick out to me and I’ll switch to the interviewer to ask a question about it. Some other good questions might be, “Why is it important for you to be creative?” or “What kind of things do you see yourself writing about?”

It may sound odd but it’s working. Since I’ve been doing this kind of journaling, I’ve noticed changes. Lately, whenever I’m not focusing on something specific, there is a small chance I will get an idea for what I want to write about, say, or just explore about myself more in general.

Some may say ‘anyone can come up with an idea! Explore the bad ideas!’ That may be good advice for some but it wasn’t helpful for me. Of course I could have come up with an idea before, but it felt stiff, dry and forced – hard to work with, like a dead tree. Now, it’s a different type of idea, one that intrigues me and makes me feel look forward to pursuing it. The idea itself branches off in all different directions and inspires me.

This experience has been really cool, and now it’s in writing for the next time I am hopelessly blocked.