Everyone is creative in their own way. The key is to understand what creativity means to you and how it has shaped your motivation and thrive for new innovations and ideas.
In my experience, having a creative brain is both a blessing and a huge challenge. The dark side of having plenty of interests, rich ideas and strong desire to create is the fact that mundane tasks and repetition may feel like torture. Now that is where other challenges like lack of concentration, pressure and high expectations come to play. And that is why doing the laundry is still the most boring thing in the world…
If you are a dreamer, have random ideas popping in your head and love to feel the fireworks of excitement for various things.. chances are that at times things might get overwhelming and rather complex. Digging deep and seeing things from different perspectives may also lead to perfectionism, which then gets rewarded with wishful thinking and eventually spiral into anxious realisation of the whole sometimes messy process and the fact that you have actually come really far from the original idea or the plan you first had. Now that may cause disappointment. Then spice that up with overthinking it all and here we have a perfect example of what it can feel like to turn creativity into a problem.
On top of those challenges, we live in a society where creativity is highly valued yet often the struggles that come with it are ignored. For example, we expect our kids to sit still in the classroom and often learning is expected to happen in ways that for many neurodivergent people feel uncomfortable. I still have nightmares of the tests I did in school! So when people talk about trauma and healing it might even mean the need to cry for all the times you tried super hard yet all you got was a silent eye roll and someone telling you “If you even tried you would do better”.
Sadly, I once thought that maybe I need to avoid being creative to live better. It took a lot of effort, learning and growth to start living with creativity rather than fighting against it. Let this be the reminder for us all. It is possible and totally worth it! We are born to create and made to discover what creativity means to each and every one of us.
What is your relationship with creativity? If any of this resonates, would love to hear your thoughts.
