Recently, I was lamenting to a friend that I felt overwhelmed by work and the fact that I have so much to do, all the time, full stop. What she said to me changed my world view, or at least, my world view of myself.
"Angie, of course you don't know how to 'leave work at work.' Your work is you. You're a creative!"
Those words have been rolling around in my brain for a few weeks now, as I struggled to process them. I've always been musical, from children's church choirs to university and beyond.
I make my living as a writer. I write about crafts, specifically, knitting and crochet. I spend a lot of my free time writing about music and art for places like Polonious Music, I Care if You Listen, Persephone Magazine, and Classical Diary. Writing, especially a journalistic style of writing, comes easy to me. I enjoy it, enough to go to work 5 days a week and essentially spend 8 hours writing - and then come home and write some more. (Side note: If you want me to guest post or write for you, drop me a note!)
I recently began designing knitting and crochet patterns with the company I work for, for a weekly blog feature. I'm fledgling, but judging by the response I've gotten, I probably don't suck too bad. I get an insane buzz from people tagging me on Instagram, saying that they are going to make the thing I designed. It's the same buzz I get from people performing my music! I get just as excited talking about the benefits of blending alpaca with silk as I do about Berlioz's Symhonie Fantastique, though I admittedly get to talk about the former a lot more often, thanks to my job.
I'm obsessed with DIY. Reupholster a chair? Make an old ladder into a badass bookshelf? Use ceramic markers to design my own coffee mugs? I am so there. I love cooking and baking, learning more about the scientific processes of how and why food cooks in certain ways. I'm a voracious food blog reader, even though my own food blog has been abandoned since I started it. I've taken an interest in photography, borrowing my wife's camera to take macro shots of what I get up to on a creative brainwave.
And yet, I never felt totally at home as a "musician." I felt like I wasn't popular enough, successful enough, or focused enough to call myself that. Surely actual musicians spend 100% of their free time writing, practicing, and performing, right? Wrong. The more I thought about it, the more I started seeing it everywhere. Solid gold composers like Dosia McKay and Everett Minchew are spending huge swathes of their time creating fantastic works of art. Could it be that we are all just pigeonholing ourselves?
I have a (possibly bullshit) theory that creatives have the ability to explore more routes of creativity than we have in the past. Community courses on oil painting, jewelry design, artisan baking, and pottery are more available now than ever. You can spend 4 Fridays in a month learning how to edit and produce amazing videos, and that's mindbendingly awesome. So instead of having to commit 110% of your energy to a conservatory as an 8 year old kid, we can practice creativity through different mediums. And won't that make us more rounded, appreciative, better musicians in the long run?
I spend 100% of my time being creative. I am a creative. I'm not just a musician, even though I feel incredibly passionate about music. I write about music, I perform music, I compose music, but that's not all I am - it's not all any of us are.
Talk it out - what methods of creativity do you practice?
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