The Makings Of A Big Ideas Girl

For the creative who hasn’t found their ‘thing’

As a child, I was told that I had an active imagination. Making up stories with play figurines, creating businesses full of trades, building treehouses and forts, and distributing family newspapers created with staples and crayons. I put on puppet shows and piano recitals. I would mold objects out of polymer clay, plaster posters around my walls and ceilings, create collages from magazine clippings and sew clothes for my American Girl Dolls. Imagination? …maybe it was just creativity that didn’t have a container yet.

I am so grateful for a childhood full of “creative side quests” as Andy J. Pizza calls them. I also realize that as we grew up into middle and high school, my fellow youngsters' culture strongly emphasized finding “their thing.” One might find sports, praising athletic achievement. My clumsy feet and below-average hand-eye coordination didn’t receive much of this praise. Maybe similar to your upbringing, there was a strong emphasis on grades and while I was also a good student, a national honor society member at that, it seemed like I had to work extra hard to keep up with those in my AP classes. And finally, there was also a lovely emphasis on the arts. Theater, fine art painting, and pottery were some of the many extracurriculars my friends mastered in high school. While I wasn’t a stranger to trying something new, I never found a niche in the arts that felt like…well, me. I tried my hand at stage management, color guard, a few pottery wheel classes, and wind symphony in the band shells for plays and ballets. I enjoyed each of the experiences they afforded me, but none felt like “the thing.” What was I even looking for? Would I even know when I found it?

But when high school ends and college peers don’t care about amateur ventures, and it feels like if you haven’t mastered something, anything… some of the creative side quests, find themselves not existing at all. I remember as a college sophomore trying to fit into any kind of mold that would give external affirmation that I was good and that I fit in. I watched her (me) throw out most of her creative impulsivity to seem less obscure to the boy she dated and to appear meek to a world that praised women for not taking up space.

I didn’t know that ideas, and less-than-perfect productions of creative projects, and to be seen trying amidst their creation wouldn’t lessen my value in a world I was trying to fit into.

I think about how that Sarah didn’t know that she could trust her creativity to be imperfect and valuable at the same time. I think about how that Sarah didn’t have half a clue who’d she become, or what she would come to value. I think she valued delight, and now she values the delight that creativity brings with it.

I don’t think she could have anticipated the ways her friends would come to her for brainstorms or the notebooks she’d carry around at all times in case of a striking new idea. While she could put it down in a notes app, the value she now places on ideas deserves a place to be handwritten. She couldn’t anticipate how her soul would rise to defend the dreams of her people. I think she’d love the ways that she gets to make an impact by defending and creating a message, mission, and vision.

It’s all to say, that I had no idea that my ideas would be valued at 26. I had no idea that my creativity wasn’t a liability to fit in.

I wish sophomore-in-college-Sare would have cared less about what people thought for the sake of her own creativity. Peer’s ideas and faces are hard to access now, but at one point their perception of me felt nearer than breath, with the negative intensity of perceived social isolation.

I wonder if, taking the pressure off what everyone and their 2nd cousin thought, I could have gotten to a place of openness to the creativity bursting out of my eyes, and hands, and mind more quickly. I wonder what ideas were lost in the time before I got to a place of settledness - taking all the pressure off the girl who loved to try something new. It’s a driving motivator for why I write about the intersection of creativity and pressure, and how if you let it, it can all be worship unto the Lord.

These days, my journal has ideas scribbled in all the margins. Some ideas take up a full spread. If you picked up the notebook I take sermon notes in, you’d see lists of ways to serve people on social media, right next to scripture references my pastor is declaring. You may find ideas about starting a thrift store, a postcard stationery line, or creating art prints for folks to decorate their houses with. You might see the start of a reader profile for a friend’s book she’s writing even though she hasn’t asked me to help her make one. This is what idea people do. We generate creative ideas. We see a world on the brink of possibility and delight and ideas, no matter how “good” or “worthy” they are… spill out of us.

I have recently started reading The Artist’s Way and it’s healing parts of my creative journey I didn’t even know needed a mend. But one of the topics the author emphasizes is quieting the inner critic. She uses the word “censor.” I couldn’t think of a more parallel “take the pressure off” notion if I tried. My inner critic told me that because I didn’t master “my thing” in high school, and because I spent way too much time in college attempting to make someone else’s mastery my own, I never would find it. Whatever the illusive ‘it’ might be.

These days, I choose to think that lie can be done away with.

I don’t know if ideating will be my thing, or if creating, drawing, starting, brainstorming, coaching, writing or the like will be either. But I do know, that if you find yourself in a similar space, that quieting the voice that says “it” has to be mastered to actualize, is a great place to start.

Your ideas, your dreams, your creative side quests, the way you see possibility, the business you want to start, the blog, the book, the screenplay, the painting, new barista pour, the zine, the needlepoint, the rug you’re grafting, the daisy square you’re crocheting, the classical piano score you’re crafting, the sewing pattern you’re drafting, the recipe you’re loving, they all matter. Who cares if someone did it better? Who cares if someone made it their full-time job? Who cares if yours flops the first or twentieth time you’ve tried? Who cares if no one gets to see it?

Quieting the inner critic, and the external real ones (because they exist too) makes room for ideas to flourish. If you don’t have your ‘thing’ could I encourage you that it might be nearer than you think? I wonder what could come when you quiet the noise, the expectations from childhood, the faces of college acquaintances that still follow you on Instagram, and see creation as worship. I think little Sarah would have gotten to a “Take the Pressure Off” place a lot sooner, and I pray that you might be able to also.

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