Do you remember when you stopped being creative? What age were you? Was there something that impacted you or just a gradual fade?
It’s often portrayed that you are either creative or you’re not. But creativity can be helpful to anyone and be a valuable way to improve your mental wellbeing.
We were all creative once
In childhood, creativity is a given. We’re encouraged to draw, make, build, play. It’s an essential part of how we learn and how we express ourselves at a young age.
And it can be purposeless in the best way. As children, we spend hours just being creative with no goal in mind. No talent required, no audience needed. It’s just us and the medium we choose.
When creativity gets taken away
For the majority of people, the creativity of childhood fades slowly rather than being about one particular moment.
If you think back to your school days, what creative activities can you remember? What did you enjoy? Is it something that you remember mainly from primary school? Or did you enjoy it at secondary school too?
For many of us, the answer to when it faded is somewhere in our secondary school years. Probably quietly, without fanfare, and without anyone really noticing.
What else we lose with it
Typically, by the time we get to secondary school, creativity gets filtered through the school system and becomes about talent and grades. The creativity of the talented art students is encouraged, whilst those with lower grades are steered to choose other subjects.
Although, we might not acknowledge it, this change can have a profound impact. It can mean we imbue an identity of not being creative. And as childhood turns into adolescence and life gets more serious, creativity for fun can fade away.
For children who were also dealing with difficult things at home and school, their focus may have needed to shift to taking care of themselves. Their priority might have been on being serious and capable because it was protective. It was important for them to focus on the need to look after themselves in the future and creativity felt like the opposite of how to do that. Playfulness may have felt like a luxury or even a risk and so they dropped it.
What remains is an adult who doesn’t identify as creative, who possibly hasn’t picked up a pencil or made something for decades, and has no idea that creativity could help them unlock issues they’ve been experiencing with their mental wellbeing.
Creativity existed before we had words for our experience, which is perhaps why it can reach places that words sometimes cannot.
Recent increases in creativity
Creativity has had something of a revival in recent years – adult colouring books, craft communities, the boom of making post-pandemic – and there are good reasons for that. But what I’ve come to understand is that its value can run much deeper than a welcome distraction.
Why coming back to creativity can help
I was the classic case of a student who dropped art because I wasn’t ‘good at it’. Despite working closely with creatives during my marketing career and enjoying that environment, I held onto the belief that I wasn’t creative.
That changed when I worked with a counsellor who was also an art therapist. Creating art in our therapy sessions unlocked things I hadn’t been able to reach through talking alone. My drawings were very childish and unsophisticated but that was not the point. What mattered was what they represented and what they allowed me to get in touch with.
I now use drawing and mind mapping with some of my clients and have seen the same thing happen. For visual thinkers, in particular, it can be more useful than a written journal.
Images that arise from free drawing can be symbolic, sometimes unlocking memories or feelings that are hard to articulate. And when used alongside inner child work – exploring what was going on for you in childhood, what you loved and when you stopped – it can become a powerful route back to your true self.
Creativity as a doorway to knowing yourself better
I would not be writing this post if I hadn’t explored my own relationship to creativity. That exploration has the potential not just to unlock things that might be holding you back but to open doors in other areas of your life – your work, your relationships, your sense of who you are.
So, I’d encourage you to sit with the question I began this post with. When did you stop being creative? And then ask yourself if it’s time to find your way back.
