National Creativity Day- A Reason To Celebrate
National Creativity Day, creating your own you.
Being creative is hard. You spend half of your life trying to push apart the brackets that society has placed you in between, and the other half of it not so reluctantly conforming to its stereotypes.
You like listening to classical music whilst creating an oil painting in primarily pastel shades? Over forty and probably single.
Enjoy knitting tiny baby hats on a Saturday using only your left hand as you stir that double rum and coke, creating a wonderful concoction and a slight fabrication of the truth to the new-born’s mother as to where the hat came from? Late seventies, surrounded by cats, and has beige net curtains.
Happily listen to the same punk rock you have been listening to since you were fifteen, and now surprised by how successfully you are currently scrambling through life? Early thirties, married, calls themselves a freelancer.
Okay, so yes, the last one is true of myself but essentially any of those above assumptions could just be exactly that: an assumption. We all create at least one thing on a daily basis, and that one thing can be understood or misunderstood by somebody else, regardless of our efforts for that not to happen. The most important thing is that we don’t stop being creative, and that we continue to create that one good thing every day.
Being creative is mostly seen as being a writer, a musician, an artist. Creativity itself however isn’t fixed by categories. If anything, it fixes itself onto an individual, and then that individual carries it around and allows it to grow by whatever it gets excited by. It can be excited by literally anything. Currently, my creativity is living its best life feeling my consciousness come out in a steady stream from my fingertips. My dog’s creativity, on the other hand, is revelling in the masterpiece that has been created from the inside of a cushion cover. I don’t understand why he does that, he doesn’t understand why I’m sat here, but both of our creativities are shining a little brighter and nodding to one another from afar.
As a day job I create content for my clients. The nature of said content varies depending on the target audience and indeed the day itself.
Basically, I get shit done.
I am in a fortunate position that my creativity loves the shit that I do from nine to five, but that doesn’t mean that it has to end there. My creativity continues to build and goes on to create anything that it damn well pleases. Admittedly, some days all it fancies doing is making a tuna sandwich, and that’s okay. Other days it takes over my limbs and throws me into the back garden for hours on end. That’s also okay. There are many times when my creativity wants to sit and relax, just wants to think about what it is going to do next… guess what, that is okay too. If at any of these stop offs my creativity results in me being pushed into a box so that other people are able to understand it, my creativity’s nature encourages me to flip the V as it does the exact same from my rucksack.
Your creativity is yours, it doesn’t belong to anyone else, it can’t be bought. Yes, you can use it to make a living but a monetary value cannot be placed upon what you get out of trusting your creativity to aid your own personal growth.
Just as social media marketing provides a platform to facilitate income generation, your creativity should be used to make your life a little richer.
Creativity is intelligence having fun, after all.