Made to make

Crossing the line that defines who gets to be creative.

If I had a pound for every time I’ve heard someone describe themselves as not creative, I’d have a small pile of useless coins because nowhere takes cash anymore.

People said it to me a lot when I was running my jewellery business, usually with a wistful tone, because they could tell, rightly, that designing and making jewellery for a living was an amazingly fun thing to do.

But I believe that all humans are creative, we just express it differently. Yes, creativity is glaringly magnificent in Petra, Macbeth, Banksy’s Dismaland and Raye at the 02, but it’s also present in change, choice, movement, meaning, emotion, connection, work and play. It’s an expression of our life force. It’s in the way we breathe.

I have been thinking a lot about my own creativity, how at times I have betrayed it, and how it is still evolving.

As it is with many young children, creating was instinctive for me. I would sing, dance and scribble with both focus and abandon. I was a child who was always making things. I was known for it. “You are always making things!” the adults used to say, and I liked that about me. Some of the things I made brought me so much joy at the time, that I still remember them clearly all these years later. Paper shoes with loo roll tubes for heels; a miniature garden with tiny twig trees and a gravel rockery; potions of rose petals and putrid water. Fancy dress was a huge one for me, I’d sew, construct from card and tinfoil, use my parents’ old stage make-up and repurpose whatever I could get my hands on to make costumes and props. Then my sister and I would spend hours making up dances, plays and songs.

I was told I was ‘good’ at art, so I went on to do that at GCSE and at A level. I wasn’t told I was good at singing or dancing, so I stopped doing those things. I gave up ballet lessons, because I thought if I wasn’t going to be a ballerina, they weren’t useful to me.

My sister was referred to as the ‘funny one’, and she was also a great cook. She still is both these things. This by default made me the ‘not funny one’ and I never bothered to try cooking. As a result I didn’t learn to boil an egg until I was 35 and needed to feed one to my baby, and I’ve still never cooked a whole roast meal. I’m not that fussed, but I raise it to highlight how firmly these early labels stick to us. Once we stop believing we are not good at something, we stop trying to do it, and then the gap between us and the thing widens.

I think the problem comes from how narrowly we define, and then constantly measure, creativity. Our education system and wider culture conspire to draw a hard line in the sand about what constitutes creativity, when it is acceptable to express it, and ultimately, what value it has.

For example, it made me believe that there were singers, and on the other side of the line, were all the people, including me, who therefore couldn’t sing. As in, they didn’t get to sing, as if ability equals permission. So for many years, although singing is a huge pleasure for me, I felt embarrassed about my singing, ashamed of my voice.

There are, of course, exceptional singers. The born talented, and singers who work hard on their voices. There are totally distinctive voices that we always recognise. But there are more singers like me, who sing with my friends for the shared joy, or on my own in the car so loudly that I get light-headed. We are all singers. We don’t need to apologise for our ability (or lack of), we deserve to sing if it makes us happy¹. No one can stop us crossing the line.

Applying this logic to any creative activity unlocks a world of opportunity, because it means you don’t have to measure and grade your output against a GCSE mark scheme, or become a paid professional. You can just let your creativity flow out as naturally as breathing; slow and shallow or in great gulps that shake your whole body, whatever feels right. And, brilliantly, you can do it whenever you want, working it into your daily life on your terms.

The inner critic or the cringe will often try to intervene, push you back behind the line, especially when trying something new as an adult. I recently went to a life drawing class, and then sung with a choir, to get me out of my comfort zone and try and keep the voices in their place. Now if I lose confidence, it helps me to remember the child I was, creating as a birthright, and I channel that energy. And that’s when I feel like the real me, doing what I was always meant to do: creating.

1. Just not if you are in the audience of Sunset Boulevard, and Nicole Scherzinger is doing her whispered, heartfelt rendition of With One Look. Other theatre-goers don’t take kindly to that.