How the act of creating helps you to grow as a person

I’ve been thinking about re-reading some books I enjoyed when I was younger, and while looking up Slaughterhouse Five I came across a beautiful story about its author Kurt Vonnegut, that I wanted to reflect on here. Some school students wrote to famous folks asking for advice, and Kurt replied with some lovely advice on how to think about creativity, rather than what to create.

Now, when I was young, I never spent much time on creative pursuits - like many who were busy hiding their queerness, I focused on areas which had clear criteria for success, like sports and school classes which gave % scores on assignments. I wasn’t discouraged from painting, drawing, sculpting or music, but I was never explicitly shown that anyone would value me more if I did them. As a result, I never gave these creative pursuits much time or thought, a pattern which continued into my 30’s.

I was therefore struck when I read how Kurt advised a student to “Practice any art… no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.” Metaphysics aside, this struck a chord with me because I’ve spent many years talking with clients about self-worth, self-identity, and how we can explore these things, and always been surprised at how vague it can feel to explore these topics with another person. I think the paradox of self-worth is that whatever you value about yourself, it doesn’t have to make sense to another person, so you can’t really rely on external validation for it like you can with most other areas in life. It’s strange and unfamiliar to say “This is important about me and this matters, just because I say it does”, so figuring out how to develop your self-worth can feel pretty abstract.

Put simply, what if practicing a creative pursuit is worthy because creating-for-the-sake-of-creating helps us to explore our essential humanness? This puts a whole new spin on making stuff without caring what it’s worth to others, which is a revolutionary idea for anybody who has struggled with valuing creativity and self-worth, or suffering with perfectionism and shame. I’ve been trying to put this idea into practice, and I can tell you it felt extremely weird as a lifetime overachiever, to get absorbed in making something new which has no other point than the pure, beautiful making of that thing. But a good weird, maybe a soul-growing kind of weird.

So my invitation to you, hypothetical reader, is to re-imagine creativity from something to be bad at, something to be frustrated by, something which invites upwards comparisons to more talented others… And consider that stuffing around with some clay, paint, paper folding or pencil art is one way to spend time with yourself as a being whose existence matters. The things you create might not outlast you by a thousand years, but they are an imprint you leave on the world by exerting your you-ness, and are therefore worthy of your love and cultivation.