Last week, I was in woest me mode to the Nth degree. I was so sure my creativity was dead and then several people - to include professors, fellows, friends, and family - reassured me that it wasn't dead. In fact, not only was my literary creativity being nurtured to resurrect later, but also my academic creativity was in full swing.
I never looked at what I'm doing now, that is being a doctoral student, as something creative because creativity for me was storytelling.
Throughout my woest me mode, I talked to God a lot. I kept reassuring him that my whining would cease, that I was going to pull out of this, that I knew this was just a bump in the road and I could always get up from the fall, dust myself off, and keep on, keeping on.
I could hear him laugh; he already knew this and more. He wanted me to move from thinking about getting better to actually doing better. I don't think it was a coincidence that I played Mary Mary's song "Get Up" nearly on repeat for several days on end.
I don't think it was a coincidence that one day, while still in woest me mode, I headed to American Heritage Dictionary online and looked up the definition for creative/creativity; I found the following definitions:
- Having the ability or power to create
- Productive; creating
- Characterized by originality and expressiveness; imaginative
Seeing these definitions, I knew for a fact that I had been creative over the last five weeks. It takes creativity to read theories and to try to integrate them into contemporary times. It takes an imagination to state what you believe the nature of technical communication will be in ten years. It takes originality to pick paper topics that haven't been done ad nauseam. It takes expressiveness to open one's mouth in the classroom and hope you sound almost intelligent. It takes major productivity to work through four classes in a semester while dealing with new surroundings, major life changes, and other work.
I smile because my creativity isn't dead; it simply manifested itself in my current endeavors.
And this weekend, while hanging out with a professor friend from back home, I had the highest pleasure of talking about literature with her and several other writers and students who attended the Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers (TACWT) Conference this weekend. My heart warmed and I nearly swooned at being able to talk about literature. And I found my heart equally warmed at talking about technology and composition and rhetoric and communication. It was almost a sense of euphoria at entertaining both creative outlets at once.
Though I'm still in major go-go-go mode with readings and feeling like I'm floundering, everything around me is saying, "You're doing OK. You really are."
And to prove to me that's so, I actually dreamed (the first in nearly two months) of one of my screenplay ideas last night and reveled for awhile in scene development.
And then...my mind went straight to thoughts of intertextuality, rhetoric, and paper ideas.
Yeah, my creativity is still there.
It's probably working more than it ever has.
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