For a long time, I battled with the word CREATIVITY. The word would shout at me in CAPS, like a social media troll and an echo in my mind. Loud. Nasty. Scary. Through my teens and early twenties, I didn’t believe I was at all creative. And I really wanted to be. I ached to have some kind of creative flair like so many of my friends.
When I was eighteen, I had a pack of tiny finger-sized ‘Angel’ cards with single words like Love, Purpose, Responsibility and Kindness. The idea was you would close your eyes and pick a card and then muse upon what the word meant for you. Of course, I would often choose the card ‘Creativity’.
There was a picture on the card of an angel painting at an easel. That was not one of my natural abilities, but the angels were speaking to me, so I felt that I had to give it a go right. Perhaps I had a latent talent yet to be discovered.
Buoyed with a divine purpose, I spent a large part of my week’s wage on paints, brushes, a canvas, a box of pretty oil pastels, and signed up for a term of painting lessons. With my angel card at my side, I had high ambitions of what would translate onto the canvas. Imagine my devilish surprise to find that I had signed up for a workshop with a male nude model. I swallowed by blushing and focused upon unleashing my Creativity.
Let’s say it wasn’t pretty. I couldn’t get the colours to colour, angles to angle, or the shading to shade. Where was my inner-Picasso? Was my Angel mocking me? I kept my male abstract painting, with his larger-than-life, giant, out of perspective foot (you thought I was going to say something else, didn’t you), floating in a purple-blue murk for a couple of years as a reminder to not take the gods so literally.
My grandmothers were very creative. They both knitted, crocheted, grew abundant flower gardens, and quilted. One even taught china painting. Their fingers could bend, weave and meld materials to their commands, and the result would be lovely. They tried to teach me, and I would do my best to learn, but my fingers refused to comply, and the result was needle pricks and rose thorn scratches.
Looking back, I can see that I was oblivious to my gifts. For the longest time, I did not think of writing as a creative ability, even though I enjoyed writing more than anything else. After all, everyone has to write, but not everyone has to paint. Using a pen is a necessary part of life, like dialling a phone and driving a car. I didn’t think it was a ‘special’ skill. In my mind, Creativity was ‘making’ something, and writing was only black words on white paper. How was that creative?
Along with creativity-angst, skin problems plagued my early twenties too. I had terrible eczema and psoriasis patches that afflicted my arms, neck and face. They would weep badly, crust over and be too sore to touch. Sometimes the only relief was blasting my red-hot skin with a hot hairdryer, as hot as I could handle until my skin went numb.
There were days where my skin was so sore and debilitating that I would be paralysed with inaction, physically unable to leave my flat or work. These were days before mobiles and computers. I would sit and stare at the phone on my desk or my typewriter for hours, frozen in time, not able to speak, much less dial a number or form a sentence. Then I would lie down and sleep for hours. I had no reason to believe I was depressed, and chronic fatigue wasn’t a thing then. At night and on weekends, I would cover up my arms, wear a scarf, put on bright lipstick and go out with friends to laugh, dance, and sing. As long as I was with people, I was ok, but being alone was toxic.
As a card-carrying 80s hippy, I diligently worked through a menu of alternative therapies trying to heal my skin. Kinesiology sessions were calming but freaky weird. Weeks of deep tissue work was gruelling but insightful. Hot water rebirthing was cathartic but comforting (especially nice on a cold winter day). Past-life therapy was always illuminating but, if we are completely honest, very creepy (I mean, why are past-lives always tragic?) Reiki was a pleasant experience but could be soooooo intense. Fasting on a restricted, alkalised diet had solid results, but I would feel deprived and malnourished after. I did it all, yet still, the weeping, crusting skin lesions persisted.
Finally, I found Louise Hay, the midwife of metaphysics, and read that the skin is about INDIVIDUALITY.
Just like CREATIVITY, the word INDIVIDUALITY loomed off the page in giant bossy capitals, like a Star Wars movie intro. I had no idea, at the time, what that meant. Of course, I was an individual. Had I not stubbornly strived to be as ‘not-same’ as others for years! I was furious at this insult to my devotion to avoiding all things normal.
At my country high school, I was the vegetarian, alien-loving, reincarnation-touting hippy girl. I had been meditating and going to New Age festivals since I was fifteen. I wore crystal necklaces, lit incense, and read books by Indian gurus. When I moved to Melbourne, aged seventeen, I would catch two buses and a train to buy organic food.
I would eat my INDIVIDUAL organic eggs for breakfast and then do morning affirmation therapy. This meant staring in the bathroom mirror at my red, flaky face, devoutly clutching an INDIVIDUAL copy of ‘You Can Heal Your Life’ and reciting to my INDIVIDUAL reflection, ‘You Are beautiful. You Are Perfect. I Am The Best Me I Can Be. There Is Nothing You Need To Change. Or Rearrange. I Love You The Way You Are.’
But the image I saw in the mirror was none of those things. I DID need to change and rearrange. I was red, raw, ugly, horrible, far from perfect, or best, or beautiful. How could I reconcile those poetic-love-thyself sentiments with the reality before my eyes? What was I doing wrong?
Breathing deeply (from indignation, not meditation), I read this part again and again … ‘The skin, as our sense organ, protects our individuality. Skin problems can reflect fear, anxiety, feeling threatened.’
I was a student of the ‘New Age’, yet all the self-improvement work was not paying off. I was broke-poor, and my red-rash skin made me feel like a monster. After all my holy grail questing for INDIVIDUALITY, I hadn’t gotten anywhere, I hadn’t healed shit.
The truth was, I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t have a career path, and I went from one casual job to the next, trying to survive day-to-day and rent-to-rent. My parents were on the verge of separating after twenty-two years of marriage. I was struggling to find my identity within a new relationship. I was a drifter, being blown on the wind like a feather, going with the vibe. In truth, it was an easy choice to make. Far easier than confronting my own needs, dreams, aspirations and responsibilities.
When I looked in the mirror and said ‘I Love You The Way You Are’, I saw myself literally. I did not see my beautiful soul, my true perfection, my shining light. Not then. Not yet. I saw pain, fear, ugly imperfection, a lost girl who did not believe she was loved or good enough, or ever would be, just as she was. I thought I had to be apart from the world, separated in spirituality, rightful in righteousness. Ultimately, I felt like I must deserve all the suffering, or why else was it happening?
For a few more years, I cried, shouted, laughed, then cried, shouted, laughed some more. Maybe none of it worked, and perhaps all of it did. It doesn’t matter. At one point, I surrendered the struggle to understand why. I kept looking in the mirror until one day, I saw beyond my story. I saw the perfection. The beautiful thing about perfection is once you see it, it can’t be unseen.
I realised one day that Creativity is always there. Bit by bit, I understood that simply by living and breathing, I am both ultimately CREATIVE and INDIVIDUAL. The act of breathing is a staggeringly powerful creative force that happens, time and time again, without force or struggle, and absolutely without the need for crystals or incense. Sure, I can be aware of breathing. I can open my posture, keep my lungs healthy and strengthen my breath capacity. Yet even if I don’t, it will still happen. That ability is individually the same in each of us.
Sometimes, even now, decades later, that must hide, not loved, ugly-girl thinking can still be triggered. My neck might welt up, or my arms will itch and rash after weeding the garden. I know how to self-care, reset and recover quickly from those episodes now because I know that the trigger is my friend, not my enemy.
I write it all out. I express. I cry, shout, dance and laugh. I am kind to myself. I look in the mirror, and I see.