Creativity: The Need To Create

Creativity. I never used to consider myself as creative. To me, that meant drawing, painting, anything art-related, and honestly, I can’t draw to save my life. But turns out, creativity means much more than that. I mean, I used to spend hours playing dressing up games on the computer, and inventing lives for my bratz dolls (lol, what happened to bratz?). And if that’s not using a creative part of your brain then what is? Now I spend my working days visual merchandising for a retail shop, and my nights clicking the camera to shoot my latest outfits, and tapping away at my laptop to get my thoughts into *hopefully worthwhile-reading* blog posts. And now I realise that I am a creative person.

As I’ve got older I grown to love creating more and more. If I didn’t write this blog or have my instagram to constantly create content for, I think I’d be at a loss for what to fill my hours with. I’m not very good (or willing) at socialising, working out seems like my worst nightmare (although I’m considering getting into some sort of exercise because apparently it makes you feel good about yourself ~who knew?~), and my bank balance is limited so 24/7 shopping sprees are outta the question. The latter, however, I am getting pretty good at.

“Why do I feel the need to create?”, was a question that was thrown at me recently. *By my sister, who was trying to provoke some thought in me to cure a little bit of blogger’s block and get the topic juices flowing again.* *Ta sis.* And now that I have a spare minute to sit down and take my time to write an in-depth blog post, I get to consider that question.

I guess the first reason is that it’s an outlet. Work can be long, tiring. Life can be stressful, throwing anxious feelings your way at any given moment. And so it’s comforting to know that there’s something to come back to, away from all those things, that gives you focus and enjoyment. And that’s the next reason. I create because I enjoy. It’s a hobby, it’s something fun to do. It’s that moment when you produce something that you’re proud of and that feeling you get when you can share it with an audience online. (That sounds really self-obsessed, like “how many likes is my life worth?”, but I promise it’s not. It’s just nice to share your passion with other like-minded fellows, you know.)

It can also be very thought-provoking to create. I don’t think it matters what you’re creating, whether it’s writing a song, a book, illustrating that book, taking a photograph, or just rambling your thoughts down into a post for the internet, it makes people think. Seeing photographs in magazines is the perfect example of something that makes me stop and think. Especially those crazy and somewhat overly-expensive high fashion ones. Even without a written article beside them, there’s always things to think about. “Who shot these images?”, “what was their vision for the imagery?”, “why did the stylist choose these clothes for the model?”, “what story is the model telling through their expressions and poses?”. And I guess those are questions I consider before I shoot my own photographs too.

And yeah, sometimes in those magazines it’s something really silly and fun to advertise the new Dior perfume. A lot of the times, my blog posts are fluffy pieces about what I got from Primark last week. Other times I like to make myself think, about subjects that matter to me. Why it’s OK to be in the Stay at Home Club, or why you should always stay true to yourself, no matter how hard a task that may seem. And whether these subjects are of interest to the rest of the world is another question, but sometimes they make people think, and sometimes they reassure others that it’s OK to feel whatever the heck they’re feeling. And that’s reason enough for me to be a creator.