I started making websites and dabbling in photoshop when I first got my computer at 15. I never felt particularly creative as a child and I hated art classes so when that part of me emerged it felt strange and exciting. I had never felt like I had any direction in life or particularly strong feelings about what I wanted to do until then. If lucky, finding our own vocation is like falling in love: it suddenly seizes us and we have eyes for nothing else.
It is a very powerful feeling to be strongly led by something, because otherwise life can feel very meandering and meaningless. That is why years later when I’ve gotten chronically ill and had to give up my career, it felt like I had lost my life’s purpose. It is pretty depressing to bank our entire life on work, because when it goes away for any reason we may find that we are empty without it.
I think that is why after leaving my career I still hung on desperately to my identity as a creative person. Without any visible output what is there to indicate whether our lives have been fully led?
So even till today I struggle when I am unable to feel creative or be creative, in my own narrowly-defined ways. Somehow things that come easy to me like writing on this blog do not fit under the creative category. Being creative has to be this whole exhausting endeavour, it must feel like I went to the ends of earth to excavate something extraordinary out of me.
We have different parts of our selves, and at least for me they often contradict and conflict with each other. Because of my chronic illnesses I had to dive deep into learning about nutrition and exercise, and because of my hyperfocus I can really go deep into a rabbit hole. Like it is not enough for me to be satisfied with knowing that in general eating whole foods is healthy, I have to go into minute details about how insulin, mTOR, leucine affects my body and how different nutrients affect them. Then it is also not enough for me to do some exercise to stay fit, I have to know which zones to do cardio in and how many sets of weightlifting can cause hypertrophy. I spend hours reading reading research papers, and I like reading anecdotes from different online communities.
Because I am focusing so much energy on my health and fitness, I don’t have much energy left to have any meaningful creative output. Not being creative makes me feel bad, as though I am wasting my existence away. It was causing a lot of unhappiness in my internal state.
But all of a sudden last week, I came to the realisation that perhaps I was just too attached to my identity as a creative person. Again I am putting labels on what is creative, valuable, and meaningful. Life in itself as a creative act and process – we are constantly creating our selves. Yet because of societal conditioning we see only certain activities as creative, whereas we don’t place much value on the easy and mundane. I feel like this is not a new realisation for me, but something I just keep having to remind myself again and again.
Most of my life I’ve just been focused on work and I have never paid much attention to my body. Chronic illness forced me to be otherwise, but even then it took me years of denial trying to live the same unhealthy ways as I did before before I really did anything concrete about it.
Over the past 8 years I’ve tried to work on my fitness and health on and off, but they were never sustained. I go through cycles of obsessive strict routines, and then I get tired of them all so I go back to having a “spontaneous” lifestyle. The past 2 years is the first time in my life that I am sustaining a lifestyle that has exercise as its priority.
In 2020-2021 I walked an average of 2 million steps per year, but in 2022 they increased to 4 millionish, and last year I almost hit 6 million steps. We are only at the second month of the year I am already at 1 million, a milestone that would have taken me 6 months previously.
I started this journey because I was just so tired of being tired and sick all the time. I was more active because I wanted more energy to be creative – it was a means to an end.
Now, I am not so sure if it is still a means to the same end. Maybe I’ve aged and deep down I no longer care about being identified as a creative person. Life has changed me in so many ways. Is having creative output really so important for me? Is it truly important or is it that I believe it is important?
All I know now is that I face no motivation or inertia issues going to the gym or running, but it takes a lot out of me to do anything creative. Is this an adjustment phase as I previously believed, or is this a permanent change?
My partner calls me a walking brain attached to a body because I spend so much energy thinking and my body is just a vehicle for the brain. But now I feel like I am less interested in thinking and more into moving. This is the opposite of who I’ve been for my entire life so I am quite confused.
I want to do physical things and have physical experiences, and am no longer so interested in facing a screen more than 10 hours a day living my life out on the internet. I was always so active on social media because I had not much of a life in the physical realm.
I am not sure if this is a temporary phase, that I am just ironing things out while my body adjusts to new levels of fitness. Or that this is finally a compensation to the overly-digital life I’ve led since I’ve discovered the internet. Maybe this will lead me to new ways of being creative instead of being so married to my own narrow definitions before.
I frequently ask myself what is the sort of life I would like to have led if I imagine myself on my death bed. This question would hopefully clarify my priorities. Obviously I cannot know the person I would become when I die, so I can only project to the best I can. But for the past few years the answer has been consistently the same. I simply want to be the deepest and widest version of my self I can possibly become. What does that really mean and entail I do not know, but I do know being stuck in old ways of living, perceiving and thinking is definitely not what I want. I am glad enough as long as I am making inroads to learning and developing more of myself.
Since I’ve started thinking myself as an active person instead of a creative person, I am considerably less unhappy. It is quite fascinating how mental shifts can impact our lives so much. We grow so attached to old narratives of ourselves that we cannot see the truly remarkable things about our selves and our lives. I know I am committing the same potential error of attaching a label to myself, but I am only human after all. If I’m lucky I’ll be able to stop fixing labels on myself before death catches up with me.