What it Means to Me to Create
I picked out my first diary from the shelves of Walmart back in the 90's. A Lisa Frank journal, it was a birthday present from my mom when I was in second or third grade. I remember it had a groovy green alien on the cover, with two bumpy fingers raised in a peace sign. The shoddy little lock on the cover, kept my heart safe as I poured it out onto those pages.
I smile back on my younger self as I recall the freedom of expression and the grandiosity with which I started to journal— my first pages acknowledging the historians who would most likely unearth and study my words.
Despite delusions of grandeur, I’ve never been labeled “talented.” Most of the feedback I have received about my painting style in particular is that it is “strange,” “unique.” And despite that I continued to create. It felt like a great act of rebellion to me. Oh you don’t like that? Well, you are really not going to like this!
Yes, I’d like to share my work with others and have them love my creations the way I do. But most of all I’d like to express myself freely to let loose the ideas and dreams that live inside me. And greater still if I can affect people in some positive way, to share and inspire, to make people think, to be part of a community, and to help each other grow.
I’ll be turning 33 this month, and I am coming out of a decade-long dry spell. A time where I shared very little of myself. My twenties found me wandering, questioning my own worth. During this time, I sheltered my creations from view, keeping them within sketch pads and moleskine binding.
My creativity, my life’s work, was safe from judgment but because my ideas never met the light of day, but they never came to full fruition either. And while creating in this way served my purposes of writing and drawing for therapy and love, I have come to realize that my ideas don’t come to their full form until I have concrete plans to display them.
I’ve come to understand that the act of publishing is actually a very important part of creation for me — knowing others will view my work causes me to push myself. Stretching, reaching, pushing myself to the edge of my abilities is what makes me grow as an artist. Publishing can mean a post to Medium, submitting my story to a magazine or just showing off my work to a friend who visits. Whatever the means of publication, the intention of public display causes me to work harder.
When I paint or write for myself, I am happy just mixing colors and expressing myself in strings of sentences but when I paint to affect others, I refine the art — adding detail and coming back to it again and again. The desire to be understood by others causing me to take care in crafting an accurate depiction of the idea.
Every day, I am given a choice of how to spend my time. In choosing to create I am choosing to do something that brings me joy and a sense of accomplishment. When I give space to creation, creativity flows into every aspect of my life from my parenting to my relationship with my partner, to how I problem solve at my job and how I interact with my environment. The journey of creation is an ongoing reward. Sharing the final product is a rush of adrenaline, a leap of joy and a moment of reflection on where I’ve been and what can I create next?
I am breaking down the walls, pushing through the shelter I built up to protect my work, my inner life — the barriers that have kept my creativity a secret and separate aspect of my life. Walls that protected but also stifled the child that lives on inside me. As the last bricks fall, out comes the spindly form of my creative self, weakened from so much time in the dark. With a loving embrace I welcome myself into the world. With daily nurturance and care, this child self will grow, they will thrive and together we will share our truth with the world.
