Welcome to the second installment of my “™” series, where I rant about and refute dumb things that people like to believe and suggest to other people as if they were true or helpful or profound.
First installment: Not Good Enough™
Dusk.
You sit across from your music stand in ugly fluorescent lighting, your eyes watering as you try to focus on the notes for one last run through before you have to drag yourself back to your bed and prepare to do it all again tomorrow.
You hold your instrument to the side, waiting for the music to twitch, at which point you’ll snap into playing position and try to blow through the music in some undefined and amorphous way that your professors assure you will make it sound “better.”
You start to sweat, and you notice that this is the eighth time this week the theme from “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,” has gotten stuck in your head.
You become increasingly self aware of the absurdity of your situation, and start to wonder if the meaning of life really is to be sitting in poorly lit practice rooms, moving your fingers over your instrument endlessly and uselessly, trying to psycho-analyze your professors in your post-lesson recaps in an effort to actually understand and implement their cryptic teachings.
As all of these thoughts are passing through your head, and the iconic whistled melody reaches its climax, your brain activity suddenly halts and you’re left, disarmed, with one clear sentence ringing in your ears “Maybe I’m Just Not Creative™.”
Now, even if you’ve never felt like you were in a western standoff with your music stand and that maybe this town really wasn’t big enough for the both of you, pretty much everyone has an experience where they felt like maybe “They Just Weren’t Creative™.”
Indeed, if you’ve ever had writers’ block, or felt creatively stunted for a bit, or gotten the “yips,” or have been a human before, you know that this idea is frequently believed by people, parroted around by the more obnoxious ones, and commonly gets suggested to you by the goblin that lives in your brain as an explanation for why you’re having trouble creating.
Don’t worry though, I can debunk this entire line of thinking in 3 seconds.
You sleep, right? And you dream dreams, right?
Or you have before at least once?
And some crazy stuff happened in your dream? And when you woke up you told someone about the dream you had? And they were like “damn, that’s crazy,”—?
Because it was a crazy dream?
Eh-hem, yes, well, that is incontrovertible evidence that you are, indeed, creative.
‘Cause there ain’t nobody else around making up that sh**. It had to have been you.
Unless you want to contend that the dream you and the conscious you are separate entities and have no crossover whatsoever into each other. Which kinda seems like crazy talk to me, but people have believed stranger things, I suppose.
Here’s another line of reasoning just in case you didn’t like that one.
Do you talk? At all? Ever?
In any way?
Or think?
At all?
Every time you have a thought and you express it with words, that is a creative process.
And is also incontrovertible proof that you are, indeed, creative.
So if there’s such incontrovertible proof that people actually are creative, why does this idea get believed and tossed around so much?
Permanent Writer’s Block
One reason people believe that they’re not creative is because they’re in a perpetual state of writer’s block. They used to be creative at some point in their lives, but they just haven’t been feeling it lately. When they sit down to write music, or play music, or produce music, or what have you, nothing comes.
And if this happens often enough, the canned and ready-made explanation for it comes in the form of “I guess I’m just not creative,” Or “I guess I’m just not creative anymore.”
People love to believe things that are simple because the tagline from Occam’s Razor that “The simplest answer is usually correct,” has been implanted into their psyche from the time they were little. What they don’t realize, though, is that that’s only the first half of Occam’s Razor. The full thing is “The simplest answer is usually correct…all other things being equal.”
So given the fact that we’ve already established that there is incontrovertible evidence that you are, indeed, creative, there must be another explanation for this.
After all, did something fundamentally change you as a living being, such that you’re no longer Talented™ or Creative™? Did you get a soul transplant? Or did you become not a human being anymore?
Did you become a lizard person!?!? (gasp)
I’ve Only Got One Talent
I’ve got 99 problems, but only having 1 talent isn’t one of ‘em.
Nor is it anyone else’s.
Because talent doesn’t exist, and even if it did, it would be ridiculous to suppose that you only had one.
You’re potty-trained, aren’t you?
So that’s at least two.
The reason people believe they only have one talent is because they usually don’t make time for anything else but their one talent in their life, and they’re so lazy, discouraged, tired, or burned out to even think about learning another skill.
Or maybe they’re afraid of being a “Jack of all trades master of none.” But again, this is conveniently leaving out second part of this saying “but far better than a master of one.”
Discouragement
There are fourteen reasons why people get discouraged.
I lied, there’s only one reason: it’s because of a lack of courage.
There are two types of discouraged people, though: the hypochondriacs, and then the people who are actually discouraged.
When someone spirals into a pit of misery and despair, and throws a pity party at the bottom, and then invites as many people as they know or have heard of before to help them celebrate, you can be sure that this person is a hypochondriac and you’d best steer clear.
Pity parties are never any fun anyways.
Sometimes there are things that happen that are really, really discouraging, though, and people correctly feel really sad when this happens. The best way to deal with this is to grieve until you feel better, and then to encourage yourself until you can go back at it again with renewed vigor.
Really do that first part, though. With the grief. That’s important.
“Well If I’m so creative, why can’t I create?!”
“Bada bing bada boom, Emma. Got ‘em. Checkmate. GG, no re. Refute that, if you can.”
Wow, you’re so right. There is no other conceivable explanation for not being able to create other than [You’re] Just Not Creative™.
Except that there totally are, and I’ve already mentioned some of them several times already:
Grief
Abuse
Being sick
Being tired
Being lazy (for real)
Not knowing what you want to say
Trying to fight against those musical vibes
Needing to grow up and become a bigger person because you can’t make good art if you don’t integrate your personality
Please keep in mind that we already know that “[You’re] Just Not Creative™” cannot be the explanation for why you can’t create. It’s ‘cause of your dreams, remember? People will usually fall back on this reasoning, though, when they don’t know how else to explain their lack of creativity. This is because they don’t believe that stuff like abuse or exhaustion is an adequate explanation, usually because they’ve been gaslit into believing that their very hectic and insane life is normal and healthy so they don’t think they need to change it.
Let me tell you, if your life is so chaotic that you don’t have surplus brain bandwidth to be creative (aka to live life), maybe you should reevaluate your priorities.
The problem we need to solve, then, is not that you don’t have any creative juice in you, but that something is preventing that creativity from circulating.
Dreams Again, Yay
“But Emma! I’m all of those things! I’m sick, confused, tired, and lazy, I don’t know if I’m being abused, I probably have grief but I don’t know how to grieve, and I’m completely clueless when it comes to the musical vibes! How can I possibly solve all of these problems? And how can I know which one is most important to solve first!?”
I know my random interjections from people I made up are sometimes ridiculous caricatures that don’t reflect real opinions, but I have actually been in this exact situation before. And to solve this conundrum, I’m going to tell you the secret that got me out of it. It also happens to be something I don’t tell very many people. You ready?
I interpret my dreams.
And if you want a reliable and unbiased, albeit a little quirky way of knowing what is stressing you out the most, or where you need to do work to integrate your personality, you should too.
Let me be the first to tell you that I’m not the best at it, but here are some tips that I’ve cobbled together over the years in case you’d like to give it a shot.
Things that happen in your dreams are representations of your life. So every character or item in your dream represents a part of you, whether that’s your past, your present, one aspect of your personality, something you’re avoiding, or anything else.
Everything in your dream is from your perspective, not objective reality. So if you dream about your best friend, this is not your real life friend, this is who and what your friend represents to you.
Landscapes typically reflect your mood, or how you generally feel about a given situation.
If you dream in black and white (that’s happened to me once or twice), it could signify something that’s old (like black and white TV) and has outlived its usefulness, or it could represent that you’re seeing things in a false dichotomy (black and white thinking), or it could represent that something in your life feels dull and lifeless.
Houses represent your life. So if you find a new room in your house, it means that there’s something in you that hasn’t been discovered yet. Or if a part of your house is dirty, it means that you’re neglecting something.
Recurring dreams are your subconscious’s red alert system. Even if the dream isn’t identical, but there are recurring symbols or actions or themes, this is still repetition, and you’d best pay attention.
You can also read basically anything by Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell and get some insights that way too.
Ultimately, the only right interpretation is the one that “clicks.” The one that makes sense and feels correct to you. So if you read some interpretation on the internet and it doesn’t speak to you, just ignore it.
Final Thoughts
It is false to believe that your body’s natural, healthy state doesn’t include creative innovation. Your body will naturally create, solve problems, think quickly, be energized, and do all the things you want it to do when you are healthy.
So don’t believe the goblins in your head (or the narcy-narcs in real life) that tell you You’re Just Not Creative™. And maybe give dream analysis a try. You might just figure out something really useful!