Why Does Being Called a Creative™ Feel Like an Insult?
It was supposed to be a compliment.
When I lived in the suburbs, we walked the same two-mile lap around Kinross Circle every day. I knew where the gravel bubbled up in uneven bumps like acne. I knew where all the men who had been found out for using Ashley Madison lived. I knew everything about that neighborhood. I think that’s the appeal of the suburbs: omniscience.
Shipped home from college by a pandemic, I did this walk again as a young adult. It felt shorter and smaller, but I’ll admit some bias there. Everyone comes home from their first year of college feeling bigger.
“I knew she was a Creative™, but I didn’t know she did stuff like that!” a local mother said to my mom and me when I told her I had just put out an anthology of poetry.
We smiled. It was nice. She was being nice.
However, as we walked past, I felt sick the way I did when I was first called fat in the fourth grade. I don’t think Arden knew that calling me fat would lead to me having a terrible relationship with food for the better part of high school and college, but sometimes a ten-year-old can really mess up the trajectory of your life.
I know that this mother didn’t mean anything by her comment. I know that creative, as a word, typically has a positive connotation. However, being labeled a Creative™ felt like it detracted from everything else inside of me. I got a 4.39 GPA in high school, I was in all AP classes, I was an NHS kid. I feared that once labeled a Creative™, all those other things would be irrelevant. I feared what the future of a Creative™ looked like. The word felt synonymous with impractical or delusional.
I like the idea of knowing everything about everyone else. However, the idea of anyone knowing everything about me makes me feel sick.
At the lunch table senior year, one of my friends said, “It’s really brave to commit to college for what you love.” She was talking about the audition I had that weekend.
My best friend at the time said, “Is it brave? Or is it stupid?”
Being labeled is indistinguishable from being reduced.
Theatre was my favorite part of high school. My life was segmented by what show I was in, and the future was hopeful if a show that Sutton Foster had once played the lead in was on the horizon. My study hall periods were spent discussing callback lists in the dressing rooms of the theatre department or writing on Wattpad in the back of whatever classroom my friend group had claimed. I didn’t write fanfiction, for the record. I never actually published anything on the site, but I did write a full-length novel on there called 4:30.
When people spoke about theatre, they always called it a “great creative outlet” and I never quite understood what they meant. My high school best friend and I agreed it wasn’t an “outlet” for us, and it didn’t even necessarily feel “creative”. For two type-triple-A people, we found that it was another thing to perfect. Memorize all of Jane Austen’s lines. Nail all the entrances, especially the ones that involve rolling woodworked bunk beds and other set pieces on stage. Finish all the quick changes early so you can reapply lipstick. There was a right way to do theatre, and we were going to do it.
At an arts college in Richmond, I was introduced to the more creative side of theatre: devising. If any word is a bad word to me now, it is that word. Right before the pandemic, I was accepted into a dance-based devised piece called Falling, Falling. It was supposed to be a show around all the different ways a person can fall: falling in love, falling off the bandwagon, falling from grace, and so on. It was probably the worst theatrical experience of my life. As a woman who loves structure, I hated showing up to a room where no one had a plan. Our director told everyone that they had been planning this show for seven years. Yet we, as the actors, choreographed the whole thing and picked the songs. So what had the director been doing during that seven-year prep? Just thinking? Devising can be a wonderful, fruitful practice. It wasn’t for me.
It was these creative things in my degree that I disliked the most. I hated looking in a mirror and making faces with the purpose of “getting to know my capabilities.” I hated lying on the floor and being told to make different shapes with my body. I wanted to be told what to do and how to do it. I could do that and I would do it well. I didn’t want to play. That was meant for children. I didn’t get why a show was called a play anyway.
Now, I work at a startup company and they are always trying to figure out what to do with me.
“You’re just so creative,” the team says. They mean it kindly, I know they do.
What is the alternative though? I tried to look up antonyms and got:
sterile
unimaginative
unoriginal
conventional
But Webster says the polar opposite of creative is destructive. The typical employees, the non-creative ones, are they destructive?
As a writer, I do seek omniscience in everything. My ex’s best friend just got married and I am dying to know: was he there? Was he the best man? He’s not in any pictures on the public part of the internet. I spotted one of my nemeses from college at Trader Joe’s this week. He has grown out his hair and wears a back brace. He was stationed at the free samples booth, which I proceeded to avoid for the remainder of my shopping experience. I saw him see me, but continued deeper into the produce section. What did he think of me in my hot pink workout outfit? Can he tell that I have changed? But also largely stayed the exact same? Can he tell I go to solidcore now? Did his ex sleep with my ex while we were respectively in relationships? The world may never know.
I wonder, when new people meet me, if they see me as a Creative™.
Sometimes I wonder if I could pluck the creativity from my body with those metal tweezers you use to play Operation. Where does it live though? I fear the answer is my brain so the surgery would be too threatening to execute.
I don't know what the alternative to being a Creative™ is. I cannot imagine living any other way. I suppose that's how I know I'm being myself. Gag me with a spoon, that’s cheesy. Isn’t it?
I used to be afraid that label would erase everything else. Now I'm afraid of something worse: that it's accurate. The tweezers wouldn't find anything separate to remove. It's just me in there. How awful to just be one thing.
sending my love,
caroline mae woodson