The hard work of the creative  

The intercession from Interim to the spring semester is always a wakeup call here at Wofford, an alarm that leaves a ringing in your ears for days after. After four weeks of intense quilting, my measuring skills could have been considered advanced, my podcast listening stamina was at an all-time high, and my creativity was as concentrated as I’ve ever experienced it. Though these skills are all important and I’m thankful to go to a school that recognizes them, the leap from needlepointing to reading and interpreting pre-modern Islamic texts is a wide one, and I admit that I am still adjusting.  

Still, as I struggle to maneuver one last semester of paper deadlines and office hours, I find it necessary to acknowledge the ways in which I have learned to hone my own version of creativity throughout my time at Wofford. I am a strictly linguistic artist. I speak using entirely too many words and I listen according to where my brain interjects punctuation on behalf of the speaker. I have a notepad next to my bed, ready at any moment to receive a scribble of creative inspiration that will almost inevitably look like chicken-scratch by morning. As Sylvia Plath once said, “I do not know what I think until I write it,” and I can think of no explanation more fitting to the way that I feel my mind processes the world. However, upon my completion of my self-portrait my senior year of high school, my parents instructed me not to bring it home because of how terrible it was. Any drawing that I have been remotely proud of can be easily surpassed by the mindless doodles of an infant, not to mention the fact that my attempts at pottery, paper mache and painting are all more terrible than the last.  

My point in all of this is really a plea: do not forgo a creative existence simply because the traditionally creative may not come neatly packaged in a box titled “artist” or “writer.” Without architects, where would we sit? Without engineers, how would we travel? Without chefs, what would we eat? Without gardeners, where would there to be rest our eyes? Without counselors, how would we understand? Try to argue with me that any of these talents can be performed without creativity, and I will indignantly oppose you.  

Whether you consider yourself to be an unartistic math-brained genius, or a savant of an artist, I firmly believe that there is the potential for creativity in each of us, and that it is merely waiting to be watered and harvested.  

In a world where so much is bland and average, dried up with logic and reason, I wish that we would all commit ourselves to doing the hard work of investing in the creativity that exists within each of us. Write your poems, doodle your outfits, make up your song. Do it in private, do it in public; do it alone, or do it with friends. Find your muse, whether it be the poetry of Whitman, or the writing of an author no English professor has ever heard of. Find it and allow it to spark a creative flame in you. I fear that if we do not kindle these individual flames of creativity within each of us, we are sure to burn out much sooner.