I woke up this morning to a new article about creativity. This specifically caught my eye because of how writer Anne-Laure Le Cunff alluded to it:
I was recently talking to a friend who was complaining about how they felt like they didn’t have enough opportunities to express their creativity. Work, social events, spending time with their loved ones… These activities, while fulfiling in their own ways, meant life was too busy to develop a creative practice.
Unfortunately, we’ve come to see creativity as an activity, something we do instead of something we embody. We take painting classes, we organize brainstorming sessions, we go to writing retreats. But what if creativity was embedded into our daily lives, instead of taking time away from other activities?
My journey outside of a 9-5 (from WFH to permanent remote to diving into freelance full time) constantly touches on unlearning something. Today, it’s creativity.
(An aside that I deeply appreciate and want to write down is: now that I’m redefining my concept of a work day, starting it with my partner by going for a coffee walk and teaching each other concepts that might be foreign to our industries/lives have been rewarding, energizing, and motivating. Today, I taught him about design frameworks and what a Pantone is.)
My ten years working full time in tech was rewarding in many ways. It took me out of debt and I learned how to indulge like middle class white people lol. I learned many frameworks that taught artist-turned-designers like me how to communicate and collaborate with stakeholders that are different from creatives. We’re talking suits, subject matter experts not in the arts, engineers. In some ways these frameworks turned the chaos of our creative thinking into sizeable chunks that are easy to navigate and understand. My constant anxiety of the future and worse case scenarios (my life, any product or software I work on) benefits from this because I can compartmentalize and “be creative within the confines of constraints”. Frameworks like this “double-diamond” iterative process (I think that’s what we’re calling it now) allows for collaboration (converging) while letting designers or other self-proclaimed creatives work in a black box (diverging). These frameworks work so that as a team, we’re moving towards a goal, a metric, a product, a thing. Get shit done, if you will. Specifically during my time at Shopify, I learned to do all this with some of the most talented and smart people. It was a different kind of creative output. And I learned how to make time for creativity the way I traditionally knew it as, but doing it in a — what felt like — perverted way that contributed to more capitalism than my actual creative output.
But that’s like… the problem, right? Output? Why does it always have to result in an output?
The article above made me think about how creativity is thought of as an end goal or product — a sticker, a website, a canvas painting etc. When people say “I’m not creative”, what do they actually mean? They can’t do the thing? If art is subjective, what are these arbitrary standards that tell you you’re not creative and where do we get them?
I think about Yumi Sakugawa’s work and how it aligns with this sort of thinking, that maybe creativity isn’t the act of doing, but rather the act of receiving and allowing — and if I could add, just being.
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Lately I’ve been trying to be more compassionate and patient with myself when it comes to “creativity”, or creating. I recognize that the doing part of creativity comes in spurts, and I am allowed to receive and allow — to curate — inspiration, motivation in my life. It comes as Instagram posts, morning walks interrupted by flowers and ducks, my partner’s openness, my friends’ joy.
I don’t have to make. I can just be.
I say all this and feel a sense of freedom. But I continue to wrestle with this because my creative output is becoming a stream of income. I fear that my creativity will be stifled from this. But I also think about how this part of my creative input doesn’t have to be my main source of income. There are other ways to go about that. I want to just be.
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Also realizing that my existential dread will be with me til I die so I better find a decent rock and mountain that I don’t hate rolling it up on.