Rekindling My Creativity
Finding ways to be creative in places you’re already comfortable
School can oftentimes be oppressive of creativity. There’s almost always a formula, a structure, or an outline to follow. Sure you can take creative liberty at times, but doing so puts your grade at risk for little reason other than “I want to”. Rather than learning through trial and error or intuition building, students are told what to do and mimicry is encouraged (even though sometimes indirectly). In the book Life Scale by Brian Solis, he explores the reasons why people get trapped in a cycle of unHappiness — yes, the capital H is important — and unproductivity.
Full disclosure: I’m not finished with the book yet, but I do find many of the things Brian has talked about eye-opening and important. In particular, Chapter 5 titled “Rekindle” is all about finding that fire of creativity that everyone once had as a kid, and relighting it. It doesn’t have to be everywhere in your life, but finding the time, energy, and space to do so is vitally beneficial.
Admittedly, I’m a test-taking type of student. I don’t love tests or crave the scantron multiple choice tests (although I would as a child and still do make mini platform games off of the bubble patterns) but I’m good at taking them — they provide a source of consistency in my grades. I’m not the typical creative student, I don’t take any arts — liberal arts, visual arts, music — I’m very much better acquainted with equations and calculators. It’s clear that I’m not the only one who sees myself this way, when I first joined Quest, the program where creative people go to avoid tests and make stuff, many of the people around me were confused by it, they thought it was a silly decision that would hurt my college chances. Of course, here I am in Quest this year, and I have no regrets whatsoever.
As a “STEM kid”, my creativity often was exemplified in problem-solving, I found physics fun and oftentimes easy, which to many non-STEM kids was a criminal offense; however, at the same time, my creative expression ended there. At least, within academics. See, I still loved creativity, I love analyzing music, the layers of instrumentals, the hidden meaning of lyrics, and even the way artists strung together lines to form audio poetry. I loved staring at art — of course, I had no idea how impressive they really were, restricted by my lack of understanding of art — but I enjoy it nonetheless. So I did what I could, I brought the creativity I found in problem-solving to the real world. At first, it was mostly limited to small activity ideas in clubs but soon extended more into my own unique style of teaching.
Still, I did not express my creativity in the way I admired artists for. I was, and still am, bad at design. My Debate club slideshows are notorious for being black text on white slides, to the point where they call it “Kenny inspired” to have an empty theme slideshow.
But after reading Life Scale, and also because it was assigned, I revisited my creative cravings. I was still bad at visual art — although the designs I make in my partnership with CognaLearn I AM proud of (very, proud of). But liberal arts, maybe I could give that a shot. I always wrote decent stories, nothing that I felt was better than the true Liberal Arts kids, but certainly stories I felt attached to and proud of. And wouldn’t you know it, college essays were also an “assignment” I had to do (which I dreaded with every atom of my body). So I thought to myself, why not just let loose and try something? So for my college essays, I went on a creative spree. Showing writing and anecdotes splattered across my essays like murals. Blocks of witty words woven within my essays, densely nutritious, became more and more present as I wrote more and more essays, slowly breaking from the shackles of outlined, formatted essays of boringly transitioned from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph. By the end, I found myself not only producing good essays but also ones that I looked forward to writing. Whenever I get into the “zone” of writing, I feel the spark once in me as a child bursting into flames, fueling whatever engines run my fingers across the keyboard, like a bullet train traveling from key to key.
…as I wrote more and more essays, slowly breaking from the shackles of outlined, formatted essays of boringly transitioned from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph.
Cooling down, both literally and the engines that run my fingers, I really am grateful for the opportunities to express my creativity I’ve been opened up to, and although one might say that these opportunities were already there I just needed to seize them, I truly feel that without being explicitly told to do so, I would have never thought to be as free with my essays and creativity as I am now. There’s a certain freedom to being creative — it’s like being true to yourself without needing any drastic career or life direction change. Although not everyone, in fact, most people, don’t need to write college essays, I encourage injecting small doses of creativity into your life. I will now continue the rest of my journey through this book, school, and life, and I highly recommend giving Life Scale a shot if you ever feel like you’re in a rut, or even if you aren’t — just read it honestly.
