Four free ideas to free your creative self

Do you consider yourself creative? No matter how you answer the question, you will spend a lot of time creating today.

You’ll create an outfit, an attitude, or a way to help a friend. You’ll create a conversation or a moment to remember. You’ll make stuff. You’ll make stuff up. Under the gun, over a barrel, you’ll come up with out-of-the-box ways to do life, one creation at a time. We all are creative. Life demands it of us.

So when we say to others — or, worse, to ourselves — that we are not creative, it is the worst kind of sabotage. It is like saying we are bad at breathing.

Let’s stop telling one another why we shouldn’t give life to that next idea. Let’s be creativity boosters, not busters.

Here are a few things we should be telling our friends, our kids and ourselves:

1. Make something every day.
   Make a meal or a joke or a scarf or a poem. Make a notecard or a paper doll or a dress for yourself. Make a face or a friend or a Facebook friend. Creating is your birthright, and celebrating your creativity reminds you of your unique place in the world.

   

2. Don’t put off starting something because you aren’t sure you can finish it.
   If you get the urge to begin something — an article, a social movement, a letter to your mom — go ahead and start it. The creative energy is strongest at the inception of the idea; and when you get momentum going, you might just find the time and resources to take it all the way. Only one thing is sure to keep you from finishing: NOT STARTING.
3. If you have a book in you, for goodness sake, let it out.
   Creative humans walk around with all kinds of things stuck inside: songs, screenplays, passionate love poems, and wild works of art. Maybe that’s why people seem so tense: a simple case of overcrowding.
   Learn the joy of letting your expressions and creations out into the world. Don’t do it for money or fame, but simply to get the beauty out where it can be found by others. You will breathe more deeply, what with all the extra room inside.
4. When someone asks if you’re an artist, always say “yes.”
   Can you find the 5-year-old artist inside you who fought for her favorite crayon color and skipped at the sight of Play Doh? She’s in there somewhere. Life will be more colorful if you let her have a say every now and then.

   

   Some of this article is excerpted from the book DO YOUR LAUNDRY OR YOU’LL DIE ALONE: Advice Your Mom Would Give if She Thought You Were Listening, written and illustrated by Becky Blades. She had a book in her, and she let it out. You should, too!

   Preview the book here.