Being Creative Sucks

“I’m a creative,” I hear people say all too often. There is a smile that comes along with it as if it is this magnificent trait.

Okay, pause. While it is Whine Wednesday, I won’t get all super whiny and cynical about being a creative. Sure, it’s all good. Creativity is definitely responsible for progression. But, being said creative can really suck.

First, ideas keep shooting out like popcorn in a machine with endless heat and kernels. You can’t possibly act on each and every idea, so what happens? Those ideas get put in a little box and stored for later. The problem is then that the someday you were supposed to get started on that idea never comes because eight thousand other ideas just pushed it further to the back of the closet.

And IF perhaps, you do get to that idea because it somehow couldn’t stay inside it’s box due to its seemingly gigantic potential, you might look at it only to realize that while it was taking up so much space and seemed so big, it actually isn’t worth much at all, which leaves you to wonder about all those other lonely ideas.

For me having a creative mind can make life very difficult at times. This mind does not slow down. There are questions firing off at all moments of the day followed by the possible answers to these questions, which in itself can be an ‘a’ through ‘e’ multiple choice, all leading to no answer at all. The only answer is to stop questioning and just do and with a creative mind when you finally do do, you end up questioning if it was the right action or if you should just start all over.

A creative mind sees so many exciting visuals and it has this battle with the logical side of the brain that sees reality. The logical side has actual experience, data and memory to make decisions, but the creative side is like “Whatever! Look how much cooler it could be? Let’s try it this way instead!”

No, I never liked math. While I do like to organize and have things in it’s place and I do appreciate data, there is nothing about me that gets a high from excel spreadsheets. I think there is just so much happening on one side of the brain that I need the order to cope.

It’s no easy stroll on the boardwalk to be a creative. You want us creatives to be normal and just calm? Good luck with that!

If you ever feel the need to hide in the bathroom to cry for no apparent reason at all, get overwhelmed not by the ever flowing ideas in your head but because you just cleaned out the fridge and it’s already cluttered again, feel exhausted from your actual dreams because they were so real, relate to a book or song so strongly that you think about it for days, worry that you might just be on the spectrum of… insane, then you just might be a creative. Welcome and… I’m so sorry.