February 21, 2024

Do you ever stifle your own creativity? Don't answer that; this is a blog post, and you'd be talking to your computer monitor. If someone saw you, that might be a little awkward explaining that you're trying to respond to the question of a trans woman on the Internet communicating from the past. Unless the person who saw you is like, your best friend and they get it. Or is the same flavor of weird as you. Honestly, I'm that flavor of weird too, so don't worry about it; narrate yourself and talk to things all you want.

Where was I going with this? Right, creativity. Do you ever stifle your own creativity? Maybe you over-schedule a project that has no meaningful deadline in the first place. Maybe you hold yourself to an impossibly high level of standards that you shouldn't expect of yourself. Maybe you just tell yourself "I could never make something this fresh/creative/ingenuitive/interesting/whatever." I know I do; all of those are things I've done. This website started as one of them. "I can't make a website, I don't have a head for code. I don't pick up skills easily, I could never!"

The fact that you're reading this post on a website I created should illustrate my point pretty well.

it took me a long time to realize that the biggest muffler on my own creative spirit was, in fact, myself. I would get mad at myself for being unable to write something I wanted to write in a timely manner. I would get discouraged when my idea didn't translate into reality exactly perfectly, the very first time. But eventually, I had to stop myself and ask:

Why did I impose those limits on myself in the first place?

I'm sure that answer will be different for different people, but for me it was that I wanted a sense of conformity; even in my most bizarre and original takes, I wanted to feel like I was doing "real work" and using "real methods". I would work at certain times a day, and get parts done by certain dates, so that I could show off a finished project to someone by X timeframe. It didn't matter that traditional work hours didn't line up with my creative brain, or that deadlines only create constant tension in my brain and a feeling of impending doom, or that regardless of my time efficiency, I would always be unhappy with the way my finished project fell on public eyes. Some of that is still true.

Today, I turned another year older, and I can't help but think back on how I've changed and grown in the last year, and dream about how I plan to continue that growth in the next one. God willing, I hope to attend college this fall after avoiding the idea for years. I hope to find a new job, in a new town, as I attend a new school and meet new people in a new chapter of my life. I hope to start HRT, and finally socially transition after being a terminally online closet transgirl for upwards of 4 years. I hope to truly live my life.

Notice how no part of that plan featured deadlines, or writing due by midnight.

I truly believe that the biggest enemy of creativety is limits and stagnation. Some people view deadlines differently, but my mind sees them as limits. "I can't take a month to plan out this story, I want to have 10 pages done by the weekend!" In a similar vein, I think limits naturally lead to stagnation. When you find something that worked (or even just sufficed) within the predetermined limits, it's tempting to reuse that again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. Don't do that.

I can't tell you exactly what works for me 100% of the time when I need to create; I don't know. Maybe there's no all-in-one answer for me, and that's okay. Maybe you have a universal set of rules that works for you, and hey! More power to ya! Just be open to new ideas and new methods of creating, because maybe it'll work even better. Or maybe you'll realize that you haven't really tapped into your true creativity yet.

~ Alex