Permission to be a Creative
[Currently sipping Nongxiang Tie Kuan Yin Oolong tea from Bird Pick Tea & Herb in El Monte, CA]
I had a conversation the other day about being a “creative” (their words, not mine) and the cognitive dissonance that comes with it if you have spent most of your living hours not embracing that part of yourself, despite it constantly stirring feelings inside of you as you experience life. Perhaps you’ve been neglecting to practice certain skills that would allow you to manifest your creativity through whatever medium you wish. I’m no perfect student myself. I have a couple avenues that I’ve wanted to develop but also have laid by the wayside: playing piano, learning how to draw, and taking vocal lessons to put music behind my words. These delays are not forever.
Writing has felt more accessible and gathering the motivation to practice it has historically been less arduous than other desired endeavors. Why is that? It could be that I write for other purposes all the time and have a mere sidestep in tone to shift output. But what about the greater question: why is taking time to make art so hard?
Because we’ve been conditioned to believe our worth is in production. Specifically, production of something that can reliably be sold and often for the profit-making of someone other than ourselves.
Art doesn’t fit in that worldview so easily. At least not the type that is both deeply personal and vulnerably public. Occasionally it sells, if it was put up for being sold, but there is a reason that the starving artist is a trope.
We struggle with assessing the value of art because of how subjective its existence is. The artist may have been inspired in one way, represented that in another way, and be interpreted in yet another way. I’ve looked at the words I’ve mailed out through The Sapid 100 project and even just a day after writing it, any one of my poems hits differently; then I hear from the recipient that they felt a certain way about it which had no connection to my own. How do you put a price on the emotions and inspirations that circulate throughout a community when the work of a “creative” is shown?
We also struggle with assessing the value of our own art because it doesn’t feel like we produced something useful.
Yet we cannot be without art. This was part of our conversation too. Companies can push people to produce all they require but without art, what is culture? If you struck down music, poetry, paintings, stories, crafts, and all of that ilk, how would we understand life beyond labor? How would you capture and illustrate the elusive thoughts that sweep into your mind with sensational breezes? Could you ever ensnare feelings of desolation so that you can heal by revisiting them in the future and help others heal by showing them that, “Yes, I’ve been there too - it feels just like this, doesn’t it? You’ll make it through.” How does one hope?
I know the horror of facing a dearth of time to exercise creativity, and it surely is a privilege. Yet, this state is unsustainable, really. For one who is a proclaimed creative, there are moments when you feel fit to burst with ideas and then you realize there is a sinkhole into which your intentions fall. This chasm has been formed from frequent passes of worry to produce, scrape by, survive.
It’s the unrealistic reality of where we reside, but I urge us all to not let it swallow up everything. Craft that idea you have into something meaningful to you. Let it guide your hand, voice, and actions - we need that beauty in this world. We need the manifestations of our creativity to be instruments of goodness and reflections of what it means to be human, and we need them to be valued. Being a “creative” is a joy, an honor, and a truth to embrace, not embargo.