The creative curse

I definitely suffer from the creative curse. As curses go, this is probably not a bad one to have, but at times I wish I could turn it off for a moment. A non creative person might react with astonishment to this notion, but I sincerely tell you, it can be a curse. Last week I had one of those days, where it seemed I have an idea every minute of the day. I usually have a lot of ideas and it does not take much for inspiration to hit, but on certain days (usually under pressure), they appear faster than I can think, the brain kind of like a stove top with all five burners on fire at once. The ideas that jump out can be of any kind; a craft, a color to paint the wall, a sculpture for the garden, a present for a friend, a design for a dress or another piece of furniture to build. Often it is an idea for a story or a children’s book and there hops another index card onto messy piles of paperwork. Actually there are index cards everywhere, along with countless files on the computer, aptly called something like ‘even more notes on ideas’. Some of these notes are more than 15 years old and even date back to the time that I worked on an Atari computer.

To be blessed with creativity sounds ideal, but still, it is a curse as well. Imagine every yard I pass I have to landscape in my head or every birthday that is coming up turns into an idea well without bottom. See, the ideas are not really what make the creativity cursed, but rather having an imbalance between the resources of ideas on one side and time and money on the other. Time and money is something I never had excess of and probably never will, but in order to turn the mere figments of my thoughts into something tangible, I need to utilize them.

There is more to the curse though than just the lack of resources, it is an abundance of perfectionism. For example, last week it was my daughter’s birthday and we thought about what she could bring to school for her friends. Not being in favor of treats consisting of starches and/or sugar, I had the idea of giving each kid some marbles, since they could have fun with them at recess and just play rather than being entertained. So we bought a selection of marbles at a special toy store, 5 different ones for every of her class mates. Being a thorough, I did some research on the history of marbles, the making and what games are out there and I also found some nice vintage photos of kids playing with marbles. So I turned this into a nice double sided card in Adobe Illustrator, put the marbles into little baggies which I stapled to the card. By the time I went to bed, it was 3 am and I thought maybe 27 lollypops really would have been easier. I have been called Martha before and I am never sure if this is nice compliment or a bit a teasing, probably both.

I picked the creative curse as my first blog entry, because my perfectionism has kept me from blogging anything yet. I have been writing blogs on a daily basis since about two years, but only in my head and on my index cards though, since I needed it to be perfect and of course never found the time for perfecting it. So on friday while sitting with friends over Butternut squash soup, fresh bread and nice bottle of Ravenswood and discussing my creative curse, two ‘things’ materialized: I should save my perfectionism for my stories and my book writing and just blog away and that my creative curse is really OCD.

Whatever - here it goes, my imperfect Blog!