I’ve been meaning to not wait too long to write my thoughts down that have been swirling. While it’s good to give some feelings a bit of space to see them for what they truly are, it’s also easy enough to let them slip through your fingers.
I study and write about creativity, pursuing new truths on its ephemeral and tangible and active qualities, particularly in how creativity shapes how we see the world and how we form our identity over time. Creativity is often agrandized to be an innate attribute acquired at birth, that some but not all can have and wield. I, however, ascribe it to its roots within the word “create” – that creativity is the act of ideating, acting upon those ideas, and reflecting on the results to inform future actions. This is something we do as effortlessly as drawing breath into our lungs, and yet we label as something that’s far more elusive.
I try to live a life and engage in practices that surface the propensity of creativity to help us connect with each other, to understand where we each come from, and how our lived experiences inform the world that we create around us. It takes a certain type of bravery to be intentional about sharing in this way, but I’ve had so (so so so so) many mentors and guides in living a vibrant life that provides space to broker and build connection and meaning through creativity. I think of my parents filling our home with music, poetry, food, art and stories that filled our minds, our bellies, and our hearts. Of our neighbors that I got to babysit their incredible kiddos within their home full of their art and the supplies to make art – it’s where I attribute my earliest times learning about the power of remix as I created small collages from their scrap paper. I still have those collages near me in my office. I think of the conversations I had with my boss in NYC about her artistic practice, and taking those works in oil stick and creating photo merges from them as blend of her passion for imparting the visceral and real with my love affair with blending stories together through overlapping images. In my work studying open remix, I continue to surprise myself with how these memories I surface keep pointing back to the ideas and mindsets that allow us to be creators of connection, and that we’re somehow wired as humans to do this.
Even knowing from deep within that my identity, my creative process, and my communicative power is born of connection, I accepted the fact recently that I’ve spent the past five years not practicing what I preach, and instead, I’ve crawled inside of myself and hidden. Not the metamorphosis within a chrysalis, but a Kafkaesque transformation born of loneliness and fear. A series of well-timed interactions made me question my desire to put my ideas and my reflections on the world around us in spaces that I felt that I couldn’t control. And then the pandemic inevitably made us all retreat in multifaceted ways, relegating ourselves to these bubbles that we constructed out of grief, of fear, and of self-survival. I was definitely created from the same celestial matter as my mom – that stardust that makes us good at appearing extroverted and glowing in public forums. But those close to us know that we’re introspective, guarded, and private, letting only a select few have full access to our thoughts and our attention. So when the opportunity arose for me to give into my grief and fear, I didn’t hesitate to allow myself to push inwards, going deeper and deeper in hiding more parts of myself. Former spaces of joy, like creating multimodal annotations of my life through Insta posts, became harbingers of anxiety and terror. It progressed to something far worse as the years went by as I started to deny myself the ability to engage in even exploring creative pursuits. I felt guilt for any time spent documenting the world through a camera lens, for taking a couple minutes or a couple days to work on a painting or a collage, for cooking a lavish meal as a way to challenge and grow my culinary skills, for wandering around an art gallery seeking inspiration and meaning. This (sparse) view of life meant that I had begun to create a harmful binary within my history and my present – that normal interactions like sharing a drink and a laugh with a friend brought me to tears thinking that I didn’t deserve such simple pleasures anymore. Mundane beauty became overwhelming to interact with after I’d denied myself the opportunity to commune with my own joy. I was so thirsty for connection, but terrified of putting myself out there and opening up to the world.
It was about a month ago that I reflected on the fact that somewhere along the way I gave my power away, and more specifically my power to be an architect of joy. This revelation was born from an interaction with a dear friend, one of the treasured humans in my life that I can go for months or years without chatting, only to feel as if no time has passed when we finally connect. We jumped on a Zoom and before we even started talking, she blurted out “You are SO beautiful!” The force of that comment hit me like a truck – that in my pain and my retreat into myself, I hadn’t completely lost my ability to radiate energy that made people around me feel something. And more importantly, that I could make an active choice to see myself in the ways that those that love me see me. Our conversation landed on the intentional practice of creating joy, and that a colleague of hers taught her that gratitude was about the past, but joy was the present. And that we could even take an intentional (and even empirical) tact on plotting our joy to help us be architects and brokers of our own joy.
Around this same time that I was learning about creating joy from my friend, I looked at a picture of myself that another dear friend had taken of me on vacation. It was the morning before we were heading from Miami to a series of islands in the Caribbean, and we spent the time milling around Wynwood, one of my most treasured spots due to its proliferation of massive works of street art and graffiti. At one point, I posed in front of a wall where the colors seduced me, calling me to linger. A week after that pic was taken, I looked at the photo and thought “She looks pretty. And she looks happy.” But I reflected on those sentiments as if I was looking at a stranger in the photo, someone I didn’t know, but perhaps longed to be. When the picture was taken, I was still in the thick of processing mountains of grief from multiple tragedies befalling our family this year, including the competing emotions of sadness experienced with my mom’s battle with (and successful defeat) of cancer, coupled with her ongoing battle with early onset Alzheimer’s and dementia. It’s probably even too generous to say that I was processing this grief, as what I was really doing was deferring feeling any emotions in lieu of performing triage to ensure that those around me were cared for as my priority. The photo and my response to it encapsulated my year quite well – that I’d made a choice to live a life that wasn’t in line with my values of building connection through an open heart, and had instead closed myself off, even to myself. And that I retreated so very much and put my external persona on auto-pilot to the point that I no longer recognized myself.
This reflection, beyond all else, is my manifesto and my promise to myself that if my goal is to use creativity as a way to make connections, to construct meaning, and to signal to the world that I contend that anything is possible, that I can’t hide in fear. That I can allow myself to feel everything without guilt, and that the brilliant constellation of humans I have in my life that love me from deep down in their bones will always be there for me when I’m not sure if I can push forward. I’m excited to explore my joy more and to do it in a way that affirms all that my friends and family give me, and that the world gives me in terms of inspiration. And I’m looking to share my creations, my process, my reflections, and my understanding of what is and what might be from here within this space. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t experiencing waves of passing fear in leaning into my openness around my creative process. But these feelings grow fainter and fainter as I continue to receive affirmations from you out there, reminding me that this energy I’m putting out there is beautiful, necessary, and valued.
Yours in Joy,
AG