Creativity - by Darylynn Starr Rank
October, 2004

‘Once upon a time…’  For many of us those words conjure up our childhoods, lying in bed at night curled up under the covers, our mother or father, grandparents, someone we love, reading to us about far off worlds, adventures, romance. It was the best part of the day. You got to find out what happened next!

‘Let’s draw a picture of that yellow flower…’ That phrase can put a smile on many of our faces. We remember what it was like to stick our hands in fingerpaint. To make our house and yard look absolutely perfect in brilliant colored crayons on paper.

One more.

‘Come on, everybody get in a circle and join hands’, and there we go, years later, back in a world where we sang at the top of our lungs and danced happily, twirling until we were so dizzy we fell down. 

But for many of us, ‘Once upon a time’, now leaves us paralyzed with indecision and fear about our utter inability to start writing a single creative word on paper. (It doesn’t seem to matter that some part of us has still always wanted to try doing it!).

And ‘Let’s draw a flower’, brings on a sweat of  inadequate terror. ‘It’ll just look like an octopus!’ Even though, when we visit our childhood homes, we sneak a look, impressed in spite of ourselves, at the picture we drew when we were little that’s still hanging framed on the wall.

‘Come on, everybody...’, simply makes most of us want to run and hide where no one can ever make us sing a song out loud ever again, much less in public! 

It’s sad and frustrating how many of us believe we’re not creative. How many of us became so shut down. So absolutely, positively, beyond the shadow of any doubt, sure we just don’t have a drop of creativity in us.

Except for some hidden feeling – that just doesn’t seem to want to go away – that tells us different.

But even if we believe that little voice, it’s scary. That’s all there is to it. Somewhere along the way a lot of us learned to be afraid of our creativity. Everyone learned it for different reasons, from fear of being “different”, or failing, or not being practical, or being “silly” – whatever. From school, parents, friends. Some of us learned it exactly because it mattered so much. But we learned it.

So even if we want to try, we don’t. Who wants to do something we’re terrified of doing, or doing badly? Especially if we don’t have to.

And trust me, hardly anyone will ever shake their finger at you as an adult and say, ‘You should be doing something with your imagination.’ 

‘You need to exercise more’, sure. ‘You should be working harder’ – uh-huh.  ‘…spending more time with the family’.  You bet.  Or ‘…fixing up the house’. Go to it.

But chances are the only encouragement you’ll ever get to be creative will be a shy, tiny voice inside you, trembling nervously.   ‘I’d kind of like to get back to making quilts.’  ‘I used to really have fun drawing trees’.  ‘I’ve always kind of wanted to try writing a story…’

I can’t gurantee it, but maybe it’s not quite as frightening as you think it is. And if I know anything, I know that doing it can be pure joy. 

But you can’t afford to wait for an outside voice to tell you, ‘do it!’ You have to listen to your own.

Take care all.

Darylynn Starr Rank (psychologist/writer) works part-time for Family Services of Greater Vancouver as a group facilitator. Her articles appear bi-weekly in The Record (New Westminster) and the Richmond Review.

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