Growing up creative
When I turned 21 my mom gave me a journal she’d been writing in since she knew she was pregnant with me. In it she describes all of the little things I was learning to do, and say and be.
At age 9 she wrote "You are very creative- saving all sorts of pieces of scraps and come through with great gifts and trinkets. You are so wrapped up in your creations that you forget or don't see the mess you make."
I love this image of myself, and can relate to that girl. In many ways, I am still that 9 year old girl.
People sometimes ask me about how I find the motivation to be creative. And for me, it was never about finding motivation. The motivation was always abundant, it was the problem of finding the time, or making time stop long enough for me to explore and finish all the things I wanted to finish.
As a girl, I didn’t have the patience to sit at a sewing machine and figure out how to wind the dang bobbin, or concentrate long enough to knit anything other than a little square, so I was creative with wild hair styles, purple lip chap, and wearing bright colors. I thought about a career in hair styling, but I’d I did, I’d want to do fashion shows, or hair models, worried that the same repeat hair cuts would bore me.
As I grew up and followed my undergraduate degree plans for a professional career, creativity was put on the back burner and I didn't realize how much I missed it.
When I became a stay at home mom, this need to create grew with me, and I knew I had to equip myself with the necessary skills to create legitimate things, no longer paper outfits or basic rectangular scarves. I had to give attention to this passion and be a grown up about it. Not for anyone else, but for the very essence of myself that I felt was slipping away in the midst of cleaning spit up off the floor and understanding my ever changing physical body. I'll talk about my enneagram number in a future post and how that plays into those emotions, so stay tuned for that!
In Shauna Niequist' book "Present Over Perfect" one of her chapters talks about travelling back to our "essential selves" and I want to leave you with this little excerpt from it and encourage you to get your hands on a copy of this book asap because it's good for the soul!
"He doesn't tell the snow to thaw and become rain, or the rain to freeze itself into snow. He says, essentially: do your thing. Do the thing that you love to do, that you've been created to do. So many of us twist ourselves up in knots trying desperately to be something else, someone else, some endless list of qualities and capabilities that we think will make us loved or safe or happy. Thats an exhausting way to live.. God tells the rain to just pour down. He tells the snow to simply fall. What are the things that he's asking you to do, the things he made you to do, the things you do effortlessly and easily? .. Think about your adolescent self, your child self, the "you" you've always been. God imprinted a sacred, beautiful collection of passions and capacities right onto your heart: what do you love? What does your passion bubble over for? So much of adulthood is peeling off the layers of expectation and pressure, and protecting those precious things that lie beneath. ...
You were only meant, created, commanded to be who you are, weird and wonderful, imperfect and messy and lovely. "
