You're not uncreative. You just stopped making stuff.

Think about the last time you made something.

Not for work. Not for a grade. Not because someone asked you to or because it was going to be evaluated.

Just ... because you felt like it.

If you can't remember, you're not alone, and there's a reason for that.

We talk about creativity like it's a personality trait, like some people are born with it and the rest of us are meant to watch and admire and passively consume their output.

But creativity is a practice, the same way movement is a practice.

You don't stop being a person with a body because you haven't gone to the gym in six months. You just stopped going. The capacity is still there. The natural inclination is still there, even if you're not doing it regularly. The longer you go without it, the more you forget how it used to make you feel, and you can lose the craving for it, but it's always there, just under the surface, waiting.

And when you don't make room for it, it doesn't just quietly leave. It comes for you sideways. As boredom. As envy. As rage. As apathy. As this dull ache you can't quite name.

You know that feeling where you're scrolling and you see someone doing something cool, and instead of feeling inspired you feel this weird bitter pang? That's creativity banging on the walls of the room you locked it in. That envy is information. It's telling you something about what you want to be doing and aren't.

The more you consume, the more dissatisfied you become. The more you create, the more energized and expansive you feel.

You can binge an entire season of something and feel worse afterward. You can scroll for two hours and feel like you need a nap. But twenty minutes of making something, literally anything, and you feel like a person again. You can feel like YOU again.

Think about how kids create. A little kid doesn't sit down with a crayon and think about whether the drawing is good enough to share or points to a future career as an artist. They just make the thing, because making the thing feels good. The drawing goes on the fridge or it goes in the trash and either way they're already starting the next one. There's no performance in it. There's no optimization. There's just the pure strange satisfaction of turning what's inside your head into something that exists in the world.

We lose this as we get older. We start creating for grades, for approval, for an audience, for revenue. And somewhere in that progression, the actual joy of making things quietly slipped out the back door.

So when I say creativity is something you do, I'm not saying you've failed at carving out time for it. I'm saying it's been stolen from you. The system keeps you so busy and so drained that creating feels like a luxury you can't afford. You barely have the energy to make dinner, let alone art.

And taking it back, even twenty minutes of it, even badly, is a genuinely subversive act. Putting down the phone and playing with something just to see what happens is a way to reclaim a deeply human part of yourself. You're reconnecting with the version of you who used to race home from school because you had something you couldn't wait to make.

You don't need a totally original idea. You don't need to be a genius.

You just need to take the things you've absorbed and run them through the filter of being you, which is a filter nobody else on the planet has. That's creativity. It was never about talent. It was about participation.

So make something this week. Write something, draw something, build something, bake something, rearrange a room, make a playlist that tells a story. It doesn't have to be good. It doesn't have to be finished. Nobody ever has to see it. It just has to be yours.

If this resonated, you might want to check out my YouTube video called You Were Born Creative. You Became a Consumer. You can see lots of examples of my various creative projects in the video--I had a lot of fun making it!

And if the idea of reconnecting with the playful, creative side of yourself sounds like exactly what you need, I'm hosting End-of-Summer Camp for Grown Ups at the Himalayan Institute in Honesdale, PA this Labor Day weekend (Sept. 4-7). We'll play games, explore nature, gather around a campfire, and have some restorative fun away from all the to-do lists.

Enjoy!

Angela