Creativity

“Creativity is for everyone — it’s an innate human trait to build things and to express ourselves through the things we make.” —Suleika Jaouad

I loved Jaouad’s memoir Between Two Kingdoms. It was a wonderful read, and I highly recommend it. I love her ideas on creativity, balance, and rest. Below are a few excerpts from Jaouad on creativity from an interview on creativity, that I enjoyed, and you might too.

Doing things I’ve never done before, sparks joy. Over the last year, I’ve tried my hand at everything from painting watercolors to flower arranging, and I’m always looking for new forms of creative expression to twist my practice out of its usual ruts. Most recently it was a creative conversation with my husband, Jon Batiste. We sat down on the floor of his studio with a couple of microphones and some powerful community-sourced questions about life and creativity. We’d never really worked together in a professional capacity, and it was really fun to make something together, to learn how to edit audio and then to send it off into the world.

I am drawn and love journaling because it doesn’t require any training or expertise, and the barrier to entry is so low. You just need a notebook and a pen. Also, it can take any shape—stories, lists, poems or some kind of hybrid between writing and doodling. If you’re feeling uninspired, prompts can be useful too — The Isolation Journals has an archive of over 200 free creative prompts to get you started.

In the past, I wrapped up a lot of my self-worth in my productivity, which made it a struggle to balance rest and work. When I was diagnosed with cancer at 22, I wrote my column from my hospital room. While it was an amazing opportunity, I often pushed my body to the point of making myself sicker. I realized I had to build a career accommodating my limitations and lingering health challenges. So I chose the freelance route, which gave me as much flexibility as I needed.

Recently I’ve been thinking about the conflation of doing your best with doing the best. I think it’s a product of how hyper-productive and hyper-competitive American culture is — but whatever the case, I’ve been trying to disentangle the two. And I think that doing my best is trying my hardest, but not at the cost of my own well-being or the well-being of others around me. 

In terms of self-forgiveness and when doing your best falls short, I have a type-A personality and a turbo-charged, hyper-productive mentality, so I rarely feel like I’m doing enough. Something I’ve been trying out lately is keeping an accomplishment log of everything I did that day. Not only the work tasks but also the tendernesses — those good things I’ve done for myself and the people I care about. I count the work call and the nap equally. When I make that list, not only do I feel that I’ve done enough, I feel proud of my body and proud of myself.

I’m a big believer in contagion magic, which is the idea that objects are imbued with the people and places they’ve come in contact with. The objects I fall in love with and fill my home with typically hold some kind of special meaning to me. I’m an avid flea market and thrift store hunter of beautiful, unlikely finds, especially those that make you double-take, like a trompe l’oeil. 

We will all have life interruptions, be it illness or heartbreak or some other unexpected plot twist that brings you to the floor. Often we think we need to get through these times as quickly as possible. But the in-between moments, even though they’re difficult, are sacred and transformational. They’re rites of passage and should be honored, not rushed. Ultimately, I hope that my book Between Two Kingdoms feels like a companion through those valleys.

“[As] we get older, we tend to accept this strange idea that if we don’t do something professionally—if we’re not pursuing painting or writing or music seriously—that it’s not for us. I just don’t accept that. Humans are deeply creative beings.” —Suleika Jaouad

Read the full interview here.