Creativity for Creativity's Sake
Creativity is not perfect.
Creativity does not have to be shared. It does not have to better than someone else’s version of creativity.
Creativity is whatever you need it to be: expression; therapy; anxiety reduction; a testing ground. For me it is or has been all of those things.
If you know me, you know I love art supplies, craft supplies, pens, paper, stationary, etc. I am always doodling, drawing, writing notes to myself, and in general allowing my mind to wander as a way to clear it. I think it is my fidget. I use these moments of creativity and expression to free up my mind to do other things.
Doodling and drawing lines calms me. Sometimes it helps me solve problems, or explore a thought I’ve had about new work. The act gives my hands a purpose, allowing my mind to calm. I try to do a more structured version of this every day and have posted about my daily art practice on Instagram. I typically use an 8 ½ x 11 notebook and the idea is to fill the page each day. It does generate new ideas but is also is a no-stakes way for me to be creative. Sometimes it is ugly. Sometimes it is beautiful. Who cares? It is the act that is important. It has never been about making something beautiful or shareable.
I think this is what people are missing. The act is the important part, not the result. Humans have expressed themselves through art since walls in caves were available to us. It is part of who we are. To not be creative stifles something in us. I repeat: It does not need to be shared or be beautiful to have value to the creator.
There is a line in the movie Ratatouille that I love: Anyone can cook. This is true about anything. Anyone can be creative or draw or paint. You don’t have to be good at it to do it.
I took a mono-printing class in early 2025 and the experience was less than ideal. The class was only a couple of hours long, I was in a different time zone and dead tired, and the room was really dry so the paint was drying quickly making it harder to use. Most of the things I made were pretty pedestrian but there was one that I loved. You can see them below – not great. I still had fun and learned something new and walked away with a composition that I want to make into a larger piece.
I still shared these images on social media and I’m sharing them again now, and I don’t care if they are better or worse than someone else’s mono-printing. There is this idea that because we share something we have to compare it to something else. Sharing becomes performative. It is no longer about inspiration or expression but instead a competition and it doesn’t have to be.
Remember in grade school when you took art class? I hope the experience was as amazing for you as it was for me. In fact, I haven’t met someone that hated grade school art class. Finger painting was the best! Or learning how to use scissors or getting glue everywhere. It was so great to make things and just play. Through growing up and the availability of social media we turned that play time into something else. Of all the things I remember about grade school art class, I don’t remember comparing my work to anyone else’s. I do remember taking whatever I made home and putting it on the fridge.
That freedom to make art , good or bad, allowed me to use art as therapy.
When I was a kid, I had these terrible nightmares. There was always some inanimate object that was giant and chasing me. I still vividly remember the giant dime rolling after me through my dream. I would wake up crying and be terrified to go back to sleep. My parents took me to see a therapist and together, the therapist and I came up with a plan. The idea was that if I had a nightmare, I would draw the bad guy from my dream on a piece of paper and then put the drawing in jail so it couldn’t be in my dreams anymore. My dad built a little wooden jail for me and the next time I had a nightmare I drew a picture and put it in jail….and, it worked! After a couple of jail sentences my nightmares went away all together. To be careful, my dad still has the jail 40 years later.
Those drawings weren’t pretty. They were never shared. They did serve a purpose to cure me of my nightmares. If I cared about what they looked like, I might not have been willing to draw them and would have continued to suffer through those nightmares.
There are so many ways that art can be therapeutic: music can help people regain speech, journaling can process trauma, and dance can help with movement. I recently read an Instagram post about a study that showed journaling can process trauma and the idea was that if you wrote about your trauma for four consecutive days, your brain would be able to process the trauma and help you move on from it.
The comments illustrate my point perfectly about how social media has made creativity and art performative. There were so many comments that all essentially read “I’m not a good writer” or “I would never want someone to read my writing.” It was clear they missed the point entirely. The act of writing was the point. It was the process of expression and taking everything in your brain and heart and putting it on paper. You don’t have to keep it. Burn it afterwards so one can ever read it. But in this day of social media and oversharing, so many people thought the point was to share it or that someone would read what they wrote.
Only two people have ever seen my nightmare drawings: me and my dad. That’s it. Never shared. Never posted. Still powerful.