Creativity

I am truly overwhelmed by the response I got for my last post, I am very happy that so many of you enjoyed reading it and that it seems to have helped some of you too. It was a quite personal topic that was definitely hard to write about but it was definitely worth it!

A lot of people have also come forward and asked me how to write an article/blog post, since they want to start blogging themselves. I am not sure if I truly am the right person to ask because I have basically just started this blog, I’ll do my best to explain how I approach writing/being creative in general tho!

Right now it’s 3am, I am sitting in my mates garden with my laptop on my lap, I honestly didn’t plan on writing anything today but I feel like you should embrace creativity when it comes to you. So this is exactly what I am doing (or trying to do) right now. I always take my Laptop or at least a small sketchbook with me, that way I can write everything that comes to my mind down. One thing that I’ve learned about myself is that I am most creative in the middle of the night, quite literally. Me waking up at 2am in the morning and being full of ideas is quite common, that’s why I ALWAYS carry pens (or at least an eyeliner pen) around.

When it comes to creativity in general I believe that every human is born creative. Some of us just lose this creativity whilst growing up, which is quite sad. Creativity itself is very individual, it also (in my humble opinion) has nothing to do with how good we actually are at something.

Every child is born with pretty much the same set of „creative skills“, some find pleasure in painting, some in drawing, some in dancing, some in singing, some in playing the trumpet. Fact is that nobodys really good at it at first. Being creative and being fearless in that creativity gives us the chance to get better at the things we enjoy tho. Everybodys gotta practise and nobody can be good at everything, that’s simply the case because nobodys can be interested in everything at the same time. We just can’t be, if we were our brains would probably explode out of heads.

Personally, I don’t even believe in talent. I mean there’s definitely people out there who don’t have to practise as much as other people to reach a certain level of whatever skill, the ability to become a master of whatever skill lies within us all tho.

If you for example, want to paint something, you know exactly what you want your painting to look like but you keep failing at actually making it look „right“ whilst painting it. Could be the case that you can’t do it because you haven’t acquired the skills that it takes to paint it yet. That doesn’t mean that you are not creative or „talented“, quite the opposite is the case really. You are creative but you probably need to practise more before you can make the painting look „right“.

What you should ask yourself is why you haven’t acquired the skills to paint that painting yet. Could be because you just got into art fairly recently but what could also be the case is that you have always been into painting but you were never encouraged to do it yourself. Loads of people say/think that artists make no money, so why should anyone waste their time on something that will never earn them anything? Point is, if you keep painting, you will get better and better at it and one day you will be one of the best and you’ll maybe even able to live off it. The same people who were giving you shit for spending so much time on something „that won’t get you anywhere“ will recognise you for something that you love and like to be recognised for rather than for your deadbeat job at the local gas station.

I dropped out of school 3 months before finals, not because my grades were shit or because I thought that I wouldn’t be able to pass finals. I am pretty sure that finals would have been fairly easy for me to be honest. I dropped out because I had already reached the required level of education that was needed in order to study Social Work. There was really no point in staying in my crappy little flat in Germany. I didn’t see the point of going to school anymore, I knew what I wanted and that was moving to London. So I did just that, despite having teachers and other students (and even some of my friends) telling me that I was about to make “the biggest mistake of my life”. I don’t regret leaving school, it gave me the opportunity to focus on the things that I actually like doing. Back when I was in school I didn’t even have the time to do half of the things I was interested in.

I spent the first week after dropping out locked in my flat painting. I painted my old furniture, guitars, canvases, basically everything I could get my hands on. Later on I put everything up on eBay, I was about to move countries so didn’t really need any of my old stuff anymore anyways. Someone even bought this massive wooden table that I painted millions of little flowers on, which was incredibly exciting because I was pretty sure that nobody would buy it simply because of its size. Ironically, the guy who bought it was my old Latin teacher, the same guy who had literally told me that I would end up in the gutter if I dropped out of school.

What I am basically trying to tell you guys is that no matter how many people raise their eyebrows at your decisions, don’t let them stop you from pursuing your dreams. Don’t be afraid of failing, failing at something ain’t nice but it makes you grow as a person. If you never try something new because you are afraid of failing you already have failed.

Our time on this planet is very limited, I can only speak for myself but I would far rather live a short but happy life than a long miserable one. Creativity is in within all of us, we just need to be brave enough to make decisions that are based on our creative visions rather than on what some teacher or our (grand)parents told us. There’s really no key to it, I can only tell you how it is for me personally, you need to explore how your creativity works yourself. When it comes to writing my blog I just wait till I get some kind of idea, I sit down and write everything in one go and after that I move on to whatever I was actually planning on doing. I don’t set myself any deadlines when it comes to writing my blog. I do edit my blogs before posting them tho, mainly because I sometimes forget to finish a sentence before moving onto the next one whilst writing. The ideas and the actual writing part happen whenever my brain tells me to write and the part where I structure (and re-write some stuff) usually happens a couple of days after the actual writing process. I hope this post answered some of your questions, and as always, I hope all of you have/had a nice day!