What even is is your most authentic creative identity? How do you find it? Are you living it already? Or is there some hidden nature inside you you’re denying? How do you even know?
Here’s the answer to every creativity problem you’ve ever suffered or will ever suffer in the future….
If you want to do your best creative work and live your most fulfilling life, you must write and live in alignment with your most authentic creative nature.
Simple.
Simple?
Really?
No.
What doesn’t that even mean?
Without context, it sounds like something in some flakey Instagram self-help philosophy. It appears great and insightful on the surface, but when you get down to it as an actual guiding advice, it’s not helpful and effectively means nothing.
That doesn’t stop it from being true.
But like we said above, what even is is your most authentic creative identity? Are you already living it?
These are massive questions that can take years of personal development to unpack. But this is the 21st Century and you’re reading this online – you want a quick answer to guide you to insight now, right?
To ponder what your most honest creative identity might be, try pairing these two thought experiments:
1). If you could live your perfect day of creative fulfillment as an adult without having to worry about a day job, your kids, chores, money, anything but the experience of being creative, what would you do?
2). What did you used to do as a kid for fun? What were you like as an adolescent? How did you get your teenage kicks? Try to think back onto actual examples of stuff you did and how it made you feel. We all have the tinted glasses of nostalgia that will change these stories each time we remember something about them, that’s just how human brains work, but look for as much objectivity as you can manage.
Where is the overlap in your answer to the first question and your recollections of your past? There’s where your clue to your authentic, creative self lies.
This thought experiment also makes for an excellent journaling prompt.
This doesn’t mean you can’t change your identity over the course of your life. Your adult creative self will never be the same as your child creative self, but your creative foundations formed in childhood. And the beginning is an excellent place to start.
This also isn’t to say that we only have one creative identity. Some of us multiminded creators carry around a world of creative identities, and this multitude in itself forms our identification. Just because we have more than one, doesn’t mean they’re all not authentic creative identities. For more on this multiminded approach to life, watch Emily Wapnick’s TEDX talk, Why Some Of Us Don’t Have One True Calling.
So, who are you? What do you like to create? And how does this overlap form your creative identity?
