A Creative Life

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

-Joseph Chilton Pierce

For as long as I can remember, I have been a maker of things. As a child, I would revel in art kits of any kind, spending long hours alone in my room making jewelry or art journals. I painted, made beads out of polymer clay, and taught myself to sew. I extended my love of creation into the kitchen, bringing home stacks of cookbooks from the library and asking my mom to buy new and exotic ingredients.

This creative spark was so strong, that it seemed a very part of my being.

But, my practical parents had grown up in a hard-scrabble rust belt town. Art was not something that, as far as their Appalachian eyes could see, would pay the bills. They had gotten their educations, gotten out of poverty, and moved up. Certainly, I would have to understand that art was lovely, but not what a person should choose for a living.

So I didn’t. Which I thought was fine, because surely, I could still do art…surely, despite whatever other job I pursued, I would make space in my life for making.

But, what unfolded was much different.

Creativity engaged a part of my mind that was open, allowing, and without boundary. The approximate decade that it took to become a dentist (one of the more artistic healthcare professions, to be sure), had a strange dampening effect on this. When I had the uninterrupted time set aside for creating, it took me longer and longer to access my creative juice, that boundless contact with play and freedom.

Sometimes I would sit in front of a table full of paints and paper, just staring, before I fell into a desperate pool of tears. What was happening?

What I think happened was a wholesale change in my brain.

In order to “fit myself” into the world of high achievement, I used the drive of stress hormones to keep me going. I suspect that doing this repeatedly during training and then in my career shifted my brain from a state of open, to a more narrowed focus. So, when I had the time to engage in art, I could never shift my brain back to that open state before the weekend was over. All of that educational training had rewired my brain, making the artistic state more difficult to reach.

As a result, I would get terribly frustrated.

Even after stepping away from my profession, it took me a long time to access the creative flow state again.

What that flow state needed was to recapture a sense of play; a sense that, whatever the outcome, it was just fine. For too long, I had placed myself in a box where there were consequences for being wrong; there was always a “right” answer.

Playful creativity might arrive at any one of an infinite number of answers after endless meandering. In order to re-train myself, I would need to practice becoming unafraid. I would need to be bold, not worried about the outcome. I needed to engage in the process of being creative, engage in the process of play.

Along the way, I found beautiful examples of artists who did just this. I was encouraged to hear them say that they often struggle with similar frustrations. Sometimes a project they’re undertaking doesn’t come out the way they’d envisioned it, it seems a terrible version of what they’d had in mind. But, they keep going. They keep engaging in the process of creativity. They find a way to get lost, to wander, to keep making. They draw themselves, again and again, into the process, not the product.

Putting the focus on creating for the sake of creating frees us up. We might make garbage, true, but we might also create an incredible work of art. The only way to know is to keep making, to keep creating. The process of creating circumvents the fear of being wrong. Asserting our artistic self in the face of the critical self happens when we decide the outcome doesn’t matter. When we decide it’s about the joy of play.

I have heard of a U-shaped curve, when you are working on art. You start out with high hopes, at the tippy top of the first leg of the U. But as you work, your creation seems to get worse and worse. If you can get beyond the lowest point (your critical perception of the lowest point, that is), you might find that things begin to look better, and in the end, your creation reaches a new height, approximating (or exceeding) your original high hopes.

I realized that I had so many fears of being wrong. What if the work that I create is shit? What if I make a bunch of paintings only to have to throw them away ( I’m frugal, so that’s like, insane)? What if someone sees something I’ve made and they don’t get it or don’t like it? What if I don’t like it? What if I can never reach my full potential as a creative artist?

What if everything I’ve done up until this moment was wrong?

Even if all of those things are true, I can still live a creative life. The fear of being wrong will likely always be there, but the thrill of the process is way more important that getting it “right”.

Whatever that means.