The glass is cold in your hand, the condensation making your palm damp. Someone across the circle of party guests is talking about the pottery class they just started, their hands animatedly shaping an invisible pot in the air. And then the spotlight swings to you. The words leave your mouth before you even think, a well-practiced reflex accompanied by a self-deprecating laugh. ‘Oh, that’s amazing. I’m not creative at all. I can’t even draw a stick figure.’
This idea-that creativity is a mystical talent bestowed upon a chosen few, the Beret-Wearers, the Tortured Artists, the Monoliths of Genius-is the most effective and damaging lie we’ve internalized. It’s a cultural poison. It allows our education systems to treat art as a frill, a budgetary line-item to be slashed at the first sign of trouble, because ‘you either have it or you don’t.’ If it can’t be taught, why bother funding it? This convenient myth absolves the system of its responsibility to nurture one of the most fundamental human skills we possess. And once the system fails to teach it, industry is more than happy to sell it back to us in the form of expensive workshops and ‘revolutionary’ tools that promise to unlock our ‘hidden potential.’
It’s a shame, because I also remember the unfiltered joy of creation from childhood. I spent an entire summer trying to build a working catapult out of lawn chairs and bungee cords. It never worked. It collapsed spectacularly 14 times. But the entire process-the sketching, the tying of knots, the problem-solving-was an act of pure, unadulterated creativity. No one was there to grade my efforts. The goal wasn’t a product; the goal was the electric thrill of ‘what if?’
The fear of the permanent mark is a big part of this adult paralysis. The pristine white page, the canvas, the block of clay-they are all monuments to potential failure. You make one wrong line and it’s ruined. This is, of course, nonsense. But the feeling is real. It’s why I’ve become obsessed with the tools themselves lately. I spent an afternoon testing pens, just feeling the way the ink flowed. Some were scratchy, some bled through the paper, symbols of irreversible commitment. The psychological weight of a permanent mark is immense. Which is why something as simple as a set of high-quality erasable pens can feel less like a tool and more like a permission slip. A way to say ‘what if?’ without the immediate terror of ‘oh, no.’
This isn’t a pitch for a specific tool so much as an argument for lowering the stakes. We heap so much pressure on the act of creating. It has to be a masterpiece. It has to be original. It has to be *good*. We forget that the native state of creativity isn’t performance; it’s play.
Creativity is the neurological process of connecting disparate ideas to solve a problem. It’s a survival mechanism that evolved into a form of expression.
The Neurology of Connection
It’s seeing a need and building a bridge to it with whatever is on hand.
I know a man named Blake N. He’s a hospice musician. He brings his worn, nylon-stringed guitar into rooms that smell of antiseptic and stillness. He doesn’t play concerts. He doesn’t perform intricate, technically dazzling pieces. He watches, and he listens. He might see a patient’s breathing is shallow and rapid, and he will start to play a simple G-chord, letting it ring, then a C-chord, timing the changes to the patient’s exhalations. He has maybe 4 simple melodies he cycles through, but his creativity isn’t in the notes. It’s in the space between them. It’s in the dynamic adjustment he makes when a family member starts to cry, softening his volume to a whisper. He is solving a profound problem-how to bring a measure of peace to an unpeaceful room-with the tools he has. He is not performing. He is connecting. It is perhaps the most powerful expression of creativity I have ever witnessed.
I’ve made the mistake of thinking I need inspiration to strike. As if creativity is a lightning bolt from the heavens. I’d buy expensive materials, setting aside a whole Saturday, and then sit there, paralyzed by the sheer weight of my own expectation. I spent 234 dollars on a set of professional watercolors that sat in a drawer for four years. The pressure to produce something worthy of the cost of the supplies was enough to kill any spark of curiosity. The real work, I’ve learned, happens when you aren’t watching. It happens when you’re just doodling in the margins of a notebook while on a boring conference call. It happens when you rearrange your furniture on a whim. It happens when you figure out how to jury-rig a broken zipper with a paperclip.
We’ve been sold a definition of creativity that serves commerce, not humanity. It’s the definition that puts a handful of geniuses on a pedestal and leaves the rest of us on the ground, craning our necks and saying, ‘Wow, I could never do that.’ We look at the finished product-the breathtaking sculpture, the perfect novel, the hit song-and we mistake the artifact for the process. We don’t see the 34 failed drafts, the cracked blocks of marble, the hundreds of discarded melodic fragments. We see magic, and we call ourselves muggles.
But You Are Not A Muggle.
The impulse that makes you want to try a new spice in an old recipe is the same impulse that drove Rembrandt to paint. The scale is different, but the neurology is the same. The desire to find a better way, a more beautiful way, a more resonant way, is written into our DNA. It’s in every single one of us.
Your Creative DNA
So the next time you’re at a party and the conversation turns to pottery or painting or playing the guitar, try a different line. Try, ‘I haven’t practiced that in a while.’ Or, ‘I’ve always been curious about that.’ It feels strange at first. Vulnerable. But it’s a more honest answer. It leaves the door open. It reclaims your own birthright from the myth that you are not one of the chosen ones. Blake never announces his creativity when he enters a room. He just brings his guitar, sits down, and finds the first note.