Creativity

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I don’t know where my creativity comes from. Ever since I was young, I was always inventing worlds to inhabit. Places I could travel to and have adventures in. They were small creations that grew over time. Then I got rid of them.

I’ve made new creations to replace them over the years. In college, it was short stories and background for my gaming group. My friends became my audience. They were a good audience. Most of the time I believed they deserved a better entertainer than me.

All my life, I’ve wanted to create things. But equally as important there’s a part of me that destroys all of it. It’s like I’ve got this bully with a sledgehammer following in my footsteps. One hand gives, the other takes.

I wonder if this is what it’s like for other people who create. Some I see do it with such joy that I can identify with and abhor all in the same glimpse. How do they do it? Have they stopped caring who is watching?

Maybe that’s the trick to be more creative. I was creative in my youth, and I did not care what people thought of it. But now that I need my creativity, I feel like it’s chained to the spinning wheel like the miller’s daughter in the Rumpelstiltskin story. The stories it spins are not gold.