Being a Creative Person
How I'm updating old frameworks
I know — two posts in less than a week! Hello!
At the moment I feel abundant. I’ve been thinking a lot about “creativity,” which was my main word for 2024. Contrary to my expectations, this has not resulted in me advancing in pottery (which I started then dropped), writing a book (my dream), or picking up painting again (more on this in a bit).
To my eternal dismay, my creative energy has showed up most often in my domestic life, in ways I can’t monetise or humblebrag about: gardening, cleaning, preparing a gift, setting up an altar, or showing care to my loved ones. I experienced my biggest moments of flow and vitality doing these things. And this has forced me to confront my notions of what makes a creative person, a label I’ve always felt unworthy of.
(What have I created? Oh, nothing much, just the very tapestry of a full rich life…)
In my senior year of high school I dropped out of my AP Studio Art class because I was too depressed to keep up with the painting workload. At the end of the year I saw my friends and classmates exhibit their art and I felt so ashamed. I didn’t realise until recently that I sometimes still operate from that place of interrupted potential. Wanting to prove myself as an artist yet feeling stunted, unable to follow through.
But really, I’ve been creative all this while: by bringing to reality what were once ideas, hopes, or the seed of a desire. More than a decade ago I couldn’t imagine myself being a functional adult. Seven years ago I returned to Malaysia with a vague yearning for roots and ancestral connection. Four years ago I bought three plants from a mall. Here I am with my garden, cup overflowing.
I think it’s important to me to become comfortable in the identity of creative person because there’s ALIVENESS and POWER here, two things I’ve felt deficient in. My inner child needs to update her self-concept, and I need to accept that I am free to do whatever I want with my life, that I have nothing to prove, not even to myself.
I’ve made and unmade myself, shifted timelines, weaved relations, redrawn contracts with myself, built good soil out of rot. Living is already a creative act. From this space, new possibilities arrive — more than I could have ever imagined.
