Some of my best childhood memories involve creativity, and almost all of them are from the years that we lived in New Orleans, in a funky pink stucco duplex a couple of blocks from Tulane University. I remember my mom and me spending hours painting wooden key chains shaped like turtles and snails, and making crafts out of sequins and felt with my friends.
I can vividly see my mom and her friends in their bell-bottoms coming home from the market in the French Quarter and making stuffed mirlitons and other delicious dishes. I was so fascinated with helping her in the kitchen that one Sunday afternoon she and my dad let me cook alone. They said I could make anything I wanted with any ingredient that I wanted. I made oatmeal-raisin cookies. With crawfish boil spices instead of cinnamon. The entire house stank for days.
My mom also loved to sew. She made matching shift dresses that she and I wore (along with my doll, who also had her own tiny matching dress). It’s so strange to me that all of these memories that involve creating are so real and textured to me—I can almost feel them and smell them. They also hold so much tender meaning.
Sadly, my memories of creating end around age eight or nine. In fact, I don’t have a single creativity memory after about fifth grade. That was the same time that we moved from our tiny house in the Garden District to a big house in a sprawling Houston suburb. Everything seemed to change. In New Orleans, every wall in our house was covered with art done by my mom or a relative or us kids, and homemade curtains hung over every window. The art and curtains may have been out of necessity, but I remember it being beautiful.
In Houston, I remember walking into some of my new neighbors’ houses and thinking that their living rooms looked like the lobby of a fancy hotel—I vividly remember thinking at the time, like a Howard Johnson or a Holiday Inn. There were long heavy drapes, big sofas with matching chairs, and shiny glass tables. There were plastic plants with hanging vines strategically sitting on top of armoires, and dried flowers in baskets decorating the tops of tables. Strangely, everyone’s lobby kinda looked the same.
While the houses were all the same and fancy, the school was a different story. In New Orleans, I went to a Catholic school and everyone looked the same, prayed the same, and, for the most part, acted the same. In Houston I started public school, which meant no more uniforms. In this new school, cute clothes counted. And not homemade cute clothes, but clothes from “the mall.”
In New Orleans, my dad worked during the day and was a law student at Loyola at night. There was always an informal and fun feel to our lives there. Once we got to Houston, he dressed up every morning and commuted to an oil and gas corporation along with every other father in our neighborhood. Things changed, and in many ways that move felt like a fundamental shift for our family. My parents were launched on the accomplishments-and-acquisitions track, and creativity gave way to that stifling combination of fitting in and being better than, also known as comparison.
Comparison is all about conformity and competition. At first it seems like conforming and competing are mutually exclusive, but they’re not. When we compare, we want to see who or what is best out of a specific collection of “alike things.” We may compare things like how we parent with parents who have totally different values or traditions than us, but the comparisons that get us really riled up are the ones we make with the folks living next door, or on our child’s soccer team, or at our school. We don’t compare our houses to the mansions across town; we compare our yard to the yards on our block. When we compare, we want to be the best or have the best of our group.
The comparison mandate becomes this crushing paradox of “fit in and stand out!” It’s not “cultivate self-acceptance, belonging, and authenticity”; it’s “be just like everyone else, but better.”
It’s easy to see how difficult it is to make time for the important things such as creativity, gratitude, joy, and authenticity when we’re spending enormous amounts of energy conforming and competing. Now I understand the quote from Theodore Roosevelt: “Comparison is the thief of joy.” I can’t tell you how many times I’m feeling so good about myself and my life and my family, and then in a split second it’s gone because I consciously or unconsciously start comparing myself to other people.
As far as my own story, the older I got, the less value I put on creativity and the less time I spent creating. When people asked me about crafting or art or creating, I relied on the standard, “I’m not the creative type.” On the inside I was really thinking, Who has time for painting and scrapbooking and photography when the real work of achieving and accomplishing needs to be done?
By the time I was forty and working on this research, my lack of interest in creativity had turned into disdain. I’m not sure if I would categorize my feelings about creativity as negative stereotypes, shame triggers, or some combination of the two, but it came to the point where I thought of creating for the sake of creating as self-indulgent at best and flaky at worst.
Of course I know, professionally, that the more entrenched and reactive we are about an issue, the more we need to investigate our responses. As I look back with new eyes, I think tapping into how much I missed that part of my life would have been too confusing or painful.
I never thought I’d come across something fierce enough to shake me loose from my entrenched beliefs about creativity. Then this research came along…
Let me sum up what I’ve learned about creativity from the world of wholehearted living and loving:
1. “I’m not very creative” doesn’t work. There’s no such thing as creative people and non-creative people. There are only people who use their creativity and people who don’t. Unused creativity doesn’t just disappear. It lives within us until it’s expressed, neglected to death, or suffocated by resentment and fear.
2. The only unique contribution that we will ever make in this world will be born of our creativity.
3. If we want to make meaning, we need to make art. Cook, write, draw, doodle, paint, scrapbook, take pictures, collage, knit, rebuild an engine, sculpt, dance, decorate, act, sing—it doesn’t matter. As long as we’re creating, we’re cultivating meaning.
Literally one month after I worked through the data on creativity, I signed up for a gourd-painting class at Casa Ramirez in Houston. I’m not even kidding. I went with my mom and Ellen, and it was one of the best days of my life.
For the first time in decades, I started creating. And I haven’t stopped. I even took up photography. It might sound cliché, but the world doesn’t even look the same to me anymore. I see beauty and potential everywhere—in my front yard, at a junk store, in an old magazine—everywhere.
It’s been a very emotional transition for me and for my family. Both of my kids love art, and we do family projects together all the time. Steve and I are Mac addicts, and we love to make movies together. Ellen grew up saying she wanted to be a chef or a “life artist” like my friend Ali Edwards, who inspires both of us. Charlie loves to write and plays the guitar. There is nothing better than a house filled with art and music—homemade art and music.
I also realized that much of what I do in my work is creative work. Writer William Plomer described creativity as “the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.” My work is all about making connections, so part of my transformation was owning and celebrating my existing creativity.
Letting go of comparison is not a to-do list item. For most of us, it’s something that requires constant awareness. It’s so easy to take our eyes off our path to check out what others are doing and if they’re ahead or behind us. Creativity, which is the expression of our originality, helps us stay mindful that what we bring to the world is completely original and cannot be compared. And, without comparison, concepts like ahead or behind or best or worst lose their meaning.
DIG DEEP
Get Deliberate: If creativity is seen as a luxury or something we do when we have spare time, it will never be cultivated. I carve out time every week to take and process photographs, make movies, and do art projects with the kids. When I make creating a priority, everything in my life works better.
Get Inspired: Nothing inspires me more than my friendships with the artists, writers, designers, and photographers in my life—many of whom I met online. I think it’s so important to find and be a part of a community of like-spirited people who share your beliefs about creativity. There’s nothing like geeking out about fonts for an hour over coffee with a friend.
Get Going: Take a class. Risk feeling vulnerable and new and imperfect and take a class. There are wonderful online classes if you need more flexibility. Try something that scares you or something you’ve dreamt about trying. You never know where you’ll find your creative inspiration.
