What happens when we let creativity lapse?

There's a cost when we devalue our creative dreams

When I was a little kid, as I have told every career counselor/expert/coach I’ve ever worked with, all I wanted to do was sing, act, and—to the extent that I understood that it was a thing—write books. (I was a voracious reader.)

My parents put me in the children’s choir at church when I was about 4, so I was singing on a pretty regular basis. (And that doesn’t count singing in the car, singing while watching Partridge Family reruns, etc.) They also took me to the local theater for Saturday morning programs when I was in elementary school. I wrote my first story, about a man whose wife had the chicken pox when I was in 4th grade and my brother, as I’m sure you’ll be surprised to hear, was suffering with the same (I caught it about a month later). We also frequently put on shows for the family on Sunday afternoons, which were tolerated pretty gamely by our parents and grandparents.

There’s nothing particularly unusual or special about any of this. Most kids do something similar, even if it’s just drawing with crayons on spare paper or building skyscrapers out of Lego, or some such combination of things. The reason we all have childhood creativity in common is pretty simple: humans were born to create.

Photo by Jairo Gonzalez on Unsplash

Somewhere along the line, though, a lot of us lose touch with that part of ourselves. We find it tough to make time—school gets busier and busier, and after we graduate, we go on to jobs and families that fill up our days. And some of us believe, quite erroneously, that we are “not creative.”

As a result, a lot of people compartmentalize their creative dreams in one way or another. Some of us are told explicitly, and believe, that they’re a “luxury”—something that has to come after everything else on the list, and even then, seems unnecessary to everyday life. A lot of us get that message indirectly through the culture, too. Others stuff them deep into the dark recesses of their psyches because someone—usually someone in authority who “knows better” than they do, like a parent or a teacher, or even an older sibling—told them they “aren’t creative.” And they believed it.

As I said above: humans were born to create. We are all creative, whether we acknowledge it or not. When people tell me they’re not creative, I automatically raise an eyebrow, even if it’s only on the inside. Saying you’re not creative is like saying you don’t need to breathe air. It’s just not how people work.

Lapsed creatives are everywhere

I started thinking about this recently when I talked with a woman about the one-on-one program I’m putting together for lapsed creatives. I asked her how things were going in her creative life, and she gave me a rundown of everything she’s doing in her business. That’s totally fair, because a lot of those things require a good dose of imagination and problem-solving.

Things got really interesting, though, when I said, “Okay, cool. Just curious—do you do anything creative outside of your business?”

It was like I had flipped a light switch. She suddenly remembered—because she’d literally forgotten until I asked—that she’s a songwriter. She sings, she dances, and she’d love to do more with her music. It’s been sitting on the back burner where she hasn’t thought about it in ages, but as soon as she did think about it, it called to her so strongly that it was written all over her face: her eyes widened, her smile was huge, and she was so excited that, even though she was seated, there was a visible spring in her step.

Photo by Autumn Goodman on Unsplash

How could that be? How could you forget something that lights you up like a neon sign? Shouldn’t something that powerful be unforgettable?

I’d agree that it should be, but the fact is, we live in a culture that simultaneously worships creativity (generally when it comes with celebrity) while telling us that it’s the least important thing on our to-do list. In fairness, a lot of things seem more important, and frequently actually are vital to your survival, like feeding your kids or making sure you can pay your rent.

Even so, we still hear a lot of cultural messages that tell us that following a creative dream is only for certain “special” people. It’s okay to be an actor if you’re Tom Hiddleston, but not if you’re John Smith who works in a bank and goes home to two kids.

Jobs and family are important, for sure. The thing the culture doesn’t tell you, though, is that putting your own dreams on hold for too long will take its toll on you. It breeds resentment. It eats away at your confidence. It leaves you with a hole in your soul that can’t be filled with Ben and Jerry’s or a promotion at work. There’s a part of you that’s been abandoned, and that part has its ways of making its displeasure known, even if you’re not aware that that’s what’s happening, or why. And our culture doesn’t recognize it at all.

Social scientist and author Brené Brown is very clear about this. “Unused creativity is not benign. It metastasizes. It turns into grief, rage, judgment, sorrow, shame.”

I like the way she describes how important it is here, too.

She also notes that midlife is “when the Universe grabs your shoulders and tells you, “I’m not f-ing around; use the gifts you were given.”

If you happen to be anywhere near “midlife” and are feeling restless … have you been using your gifts?

My story

By my senior year in high school, I’d been writing a lot. I wrote fiction in pretty much any spare moment I could get my hands on. I’d spent more than two years adding new pages to a binder in my 10th grade English teacher’s classroom—because he’d once made the mistake of asking if he could see what I was writing outside of class—and planned on majoring in English when I went off to college.

When it came time to actually fill out my application, one question asked what my career aspirations were. I wrote, “Writer,” and moved on, thinking nothing of it. Nothing, that is, until my dad saw it and informed me that I could not possibly put on my college application that I wanted to be a writer. “You can say that you want to be a lawyer or a journalist or some other thing that uses writing, but you can’t say you want to be a writer.”

I’m not sure where he got the idea that writing is not a real job, which I don’t remember him saying, but was clearly the implication, unless he assumed that I could only mean “novelist.” Lord knows, plenty of people in this world get paid, and paid well, to write, at least until ChatGPT comes for us all. At this point, I can’t remember what I substituted in order to make him happy, which I had to do to preserve a measure of my own happiness, even though I knew I was lying—and I hated it.

I went on to major in English and sing in my alma mater’s excellent choir for four years, but I graduated with no idea what I wanted to do, and thus, no job, which meant floundering around with temp agencies and other jobs that were sort of writing related. Technical writing was my first “real” job, and while I learned a lot from it and have immense respect for those who do it, it was certainly not the kind of writing that interested me, but because that’s what I did all day, no other kinds were happening after hours.

For years, I just couldn’t figure out what I wanted to “be” when I grew up. I worked with coaches and career counselors and would get so frustrated when they would insist to me that I “really do know” what that something was. Did they not think I’d have told them if I knew? I mean, I wanted to know even more than they did, I was sure, and how absurd to insist I knew something I clearly did not? The closest I came to the right day job for me was teaching writing (irony alert!), because I could use what I knew to help my students.

I am now 99% sure that the answer was right there in my childhood, and even to some degree on that college application, but because I was told that none of those things were acceptable career aspirations—that they were only for “some” people, the “special” people, or that I wasn’t good enough, or those careers weren’t good enough, or that I couldn’t make enough money at them to survive—I pushed them as far down into myself as I could and never considered them again. No wonder it was such a mystery to me!

A few years after dipping my toe back into the writing waters via a fanfic challenge, I eventually got my MFA in creative writing. Even More Irony Alert: my dad was the one who helped me write my funding proposal to the school where I was teaching. (I guess he figured out it wasn’t going away—and not being one for much writing, he had the grace to make fun of himself by signing “The Literary Expert” when he’d reply to my drafts.) I ended up writing a novel for my thesis, which was the first time I actually finished one.

OMG! I wrote a book!

Clues

Is writing my “dream” job? I’m honestly not sure, though I do love it. (Having been a proofreader, which is related, I can say that’s most definitely not my dream job.) I’m still in love with singing, too, and feel a pang of envy every time I hear someone like Annie Lennox do something amazing, or when I watch great acting or improv. That feels like a clue. I may have been more interested in those options as careers 30 years ago than I am now—I’m old enough at this point to know that celebrity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and I’m not particularly interested in chasing it—and would probably need to find other ways to engage with them, even if money were involved. Fortunately, it doesn’t need to be—for any of us.

Creativity coaching, which I discovered a few years after I finished my MFA, lights me up, too. It’s a lot like teaching, but without grades or administrators or parents. And I get to help others who’ve stuffed their creative dreams down into themselves to the point where they have trouble reconnecting to them—and maybe even remembering they’re there. It’s honestly one of the most amazing things I’ve ever done.

It’s so very possible to bring those dreams back to the surface and play with them. The first step is just to believe that we can—and that we’re worth it. That it’s okay. It’s not too late. It’s not a waste of time. It’s a part of who we are, just as much as being an athlete, a parent, a town councillor, or any other role we take on in this life.

Creativity is not a luxury. It’s a necessity.

Let me bust one other myth very quickly: A lot of people think they don’t have the energy to do something creative on top of everything else they already have to do. I get it. I know the feeling well. But I also know that depriving ourselves of our creativity is part of what drains us. When we step back into that world, even one tiny step at a time, it opens us up to more joy and wonder than we had before, reacquainting us with parts of ourselves we’d forgotten as we bring them back to life. That’s an energizing force to be reckoned with. The more we do our creativity, the more energy we have.

If you don’t want to take my word for it, I highly recommend listening to my conversations with therapist and writer Dr. Kelly Flanagan and artist and illustrator Dave Spencer, both of whom talk about this phenomenon.

Do you see yourself here?

If you’ve been reading this with the rising suspicion that I’m talking about you, first of all, I want you to know that you’re not alone. While I don’t have stats, I’m quite confident that there are millions of people in the same position.

Beyond that, as I mentioned above, I’m working on a course to help lapsed creatives reconnect with this essential part of themselves. Your input, even if you’re not sure what your creative dream is, would be incredibly helpful to me as I put this course together. If you’d be willing to give me about 30 minutes of your time, I’d love to talk to you. Just hit reply (if you’re reading this in the Substack app, send me a direct message) and we’ll set something up. My gratitude in advance.

I’ll leave you with this thought: When the cultural status quo is to ignore, devalue, and even downplay creativity, actually engaging yours becomes an act of resistance—and the only way the culture will change is for enough people to decide they’re going to do it anyway. 😁