For the tenth time in the last five minutes, I looked at the clock. Just a couple of minutes to go before my appointment with the undergraduate advisor. I only had twenty minutes with her, and I meant to make full use of them. I fidgeted in my metallic waiting room chair. The office was decorated with wood-paneling meant to evoke the college’s origins as a forestry school, but they merely produced a tacky 1970’s effect. I absently flipped through the pamphlets I’d grabbed at the check-in window. Beautiful and racially diverse young people smiled back at me, urging me to join the Peace Corps, to teach English abroad, and to apply for the honors research program.
I had finally made it to my dream university, the one I’d chosen because they had an entire college dedicated to environmental studies. That was where my resolve faltered. What exactly did I mean to do with that? Did I really belong here? My favorite subjects in high school had always been humanities, especially anything related to ethics or philosophy. I’d only taken AP Environmental Science because the college counselor had told me I needed an AP science, and I’d heard that one was easy. However, in AP Environmental Science class I’d learned about global warming, and global warming changed everything. I couldn’t just sit around musing about ontologies and epistemologies when the world was almost literally on fire. I was an adult now. It was time to get serious.
Besides, when I imagined myself as a historian or a novelist or a journalist or psychologist, none of those seemed to fit anyway. All I really wanted to do was sit around and muse. I just wanted to frolic in the playground of ideas. I wanted to jam with other thinkers the way musicians jam with other musicians, merging my style of thinking with theirs and seeing what new perspectives we could create together. But this wasn’t ancient Greece, and there were no philosophers anymore. Or if there were, they didn’t seem to be making much of a difference. Now the people in these pamphlets, they were saving the world.
Finally, the advisor called me into her office. We sat down, and I explained that I didn’t know what I wanted to major in, but I was thinking maybe Environmental Science, Policy, and Management because that seemed like a versatile major with a lot of career options.
She asked, “Have you thought about career options?”
I replied, “I don’t know, I could see myself going into just about anything. Anything but research. Definitely not research.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. “A research internship is a great way to make connections on campus, and there’s a lot of opportunities out there. You could just try it and see if you like it.”
I wasn’t sure. The clock was ticking. I nodded and said, “Okay, maybe.”
I went home and thought about it. Why not research? It seemed about as interesting to me as any other serious career. Besides, as a scientist I could do something good for society, instead of selfishly sitting around dreaming up ideas that don’t matter.
So I applied to research positions around campus. I got one offer, from a plant biology lab. I accepted it. I started out sorting seeds, and two years later I was using molecular biology techniques to uncover novel results that we later published. Apparently I was not half bad at plant biology, and I liked it well enough. It was no playground of ideas, but it was a serious career in which I could do work that actually mattered.
And that is the story of how I became a plant biology researcher. I did not so much choose plant biology as I simply tossed my dreams into the garbage can and then ran in the other direction.
The Father Crastor fantasy raises questions about how deny or discover our own creativity. Crastor denied his creative impulses, propelling himself into the monastery out of shame and out of a desire to be a better person. He heard the call of magic and refused to answer. Instead, he used his work to silence this alluring call.
For a long time, science was my monastery. It was an institution that I thought would finally turn me into a good, respectable person. I devoted myself to it whole-heartedly, but I’d always had doubts. I unconsciously noted moments like the one in my advisor’s office, and whenever my creativity started to emerge, some part of me could whip out those memories and say, “See, research is the best path, so sit down and be quiet! Nobody wants to hear what you think!”
The medieval church is a great symbol for this part of ourselves that wants to keep our creativity under control. There is zero tolerance for heresy. This part of me is like the abbot, insisting that everything wild and natural is wrong. It latched onto global warming as the perfect excuse to suppress my creativity. My environmentalism stemmed from, among other things, an urgent sense that nature was getting out of control, and I had to manage it. Under the pretense of being serious and responsible, my inner abbot insisted that my creative urges were so evil they were literally destroying the world. My search for a ‘serious’ career was about the triumph of conformity over imagination.
Nearly a decade later, I got fed up with this. Desperately lonely and bursting with righteous anger, I began to write. I wrote about my daydreams, even though my inner abbot told me that I ought to be ashamed of myself. I discovered that, far from being harmful nonsense, my daydream world was my beloved playground of ideas all along. My playful inner magician, silenced for so long, began to find her voice.
Now this is one interpretation of my creative journey, and it is partially true. It is the story of how I suppressed my creativity until finally I got over my shame and fear, and I began to write for fun. It is a simple and heroic story that ends with me extolling the value of creativity, and exhorting you to unleash your creativity, too, so that you may “fulfill your potential.”
Most people who write about creativity tell some version of this story. They will encourage you to do creative works so that you can become your best self. And so we put creativity on our to-do list, somewhere between meditating and cleaning the garage. We gently chastize ourselves for not signing up for painting class or music lessons, or we imagine that we’ll get around to creativity once we retire. The standard narrative presents creativity as a choice. I would like to challenge this view. Creativity is almost synonymous with imagination, and it is not a choice. You cannot stop being creative any more than you can stop thinking. The great task of life is not to liberate our creativity, but to to make sense of the creativity that is already leaking out of us all the time.
I’d like to redefine both what creativity is and why we should engage with it. Let’s start with the former. In my experience, creativity is less like a task on our to-do list and more like a bleeding wound that can’t be stopped with band-aids. Creativity is anything you produce that bears signs of having been produced by you. The only difference between creative work and non-creative work is that in creative work your psyche is showing. We do not usually see the psyche in a messy bedroom, a sandwich, or a sticky note. Nor are we likely to regard a friendship, a piece of gossip, or a secret crush as a creative work. Nevertheless, these are all things that your inner creative force produced. That sandwich absolutely says something about your psyche. Did you choose wheat bread because you’re trying to watch your weight? Did you cut off the crusts because they offend you? Did you, like my father does, slop on a single giant lump of peanut butter and a single giant lump of jelly and call it a day? Show me a sandwich, and I’ll show you a fantasy. Almost everything you create is creative. Your life is your magnum opus! The relationships you’ve built, the bridges you’ve burned, and the projects and people you’ve cultivated are all creative products. When we see a life as a creative product, it can be viewed in much the same way we would view a painting or a music video or a dream. That is, we can look for classic motifs coming out in fresh ways. The same motifs that are woven throughout your songs or your poems are also woven throughout your material life and your relationships.
This definition of creativity—psychic products—changes how we might interpret the story of my career. I tried to use science to repress my creativity. But my creativity came out anyway. My inner abbot was not really keeping my inner magician repressed at all. If we look hard enough, we see that both the abbot and the playful magician were there all along. The story is not about one’s triumph over the other, but about the eternal struggle between them.
There was the time, as a new grad student, that I asked an eccentric elderly professor out to coffee, and together we shared wild theories about plant evolution and derided all these young professors who don’t know how to think for themselves. Gesturing with my biscotti, I declared, “It’s like they’re living in a bubble of papers from the last ten years, and they never think about how we got here!” Eagerly, he responded, “Yes! That’s exactly it, Hope, they’re in a bubble. And they don’t know how to think outside of it.”
There was the time I was involved in a science communication club that operated science outreach booths about food waste, vaccines, DNA, citrus greening disease, women in science, and the like. Once, I organized a booth about magic. Actually, it was about psi research, or research into paranormal or inexplicable phenomena. It included a delightful activity where folks could develop hypotheses for a real double-blind study quantifying the mood benefits of ritually blessed food.
I could give more examples. There was the time I wrote a 30-page essay for a bioethics class about how science is a mythology. There was the high-risk, high-reward endeavor that I insisted upon making my PhD project. My point is this: the magician does not conquer the abbot in the end. They are both part of my creativity, and they will both continue showing up again and again, no matter what I choose to do with my life.
Creativity presents us with a very important contradiction. On the one hand, we feel the heroic call to build and to grow, and indeed when we heed the call amazing things happen. On the other hand, we cannot deny that our art, science, and other creative products are merely expressing the concerns that we will always express no matter what we do. So with our new definition of creativity the question becomes: are we in control of our creativity, or is our creativity in control of us? The answer is: yes. We will largely always be fascinated by our core fantasies. We can’t stop loving what we love nor stop hating what we hate. Nevertheless, there is still room for heroism, growth, and happy endings.
The way out of this contradiction lies in the fact that you are not the creator, but that doesn’t make you powerless. It is not your task to create art or science or whatever, but your imagination’s task. Your task is to choose what raw materials to put in front of your imagination. Imagination will pick up whatever is around you, so you can choose the circumstances in which imagination will operate. If you present your imagination with paints or a guitar, your fantasies will come out in your paintings and songs. If you present your imagination with science, your fantasies will come out in your science. If you present your imagination with legal work, your fantasies will come out in your arguments.
If your interest in creativity is merely for the sake of de-stressing, then by all means, go ahead and pick up a hobby and leave it at that. But if your goal is something along the lines of fulfilling your potential, then I say you must look down as well as up. Look at your life and find the story your psyche is trying to tell, and then consider whether you’re happy with the way it’s currently being told. I was partly attracted to science because it let me enact my fantasy of undermining dogmatic authorities with silliness. With this blog, I am enacting the same fantasy, but doing so in a way that is more to my liking, namely, undermining modern psychology with my daydreams.
Creativity is not really about overcoming your shame—that narrative is just a fantasy that doesn’t realize it’s a fantasy. If you struggle with shame, you’ll probably always struggle with shame, and your life and your art will reflect that struggle. Creativity is not about resolving your inner conflicts. It’s about choosing how to express those conflicts. You can’t change your soul, but you can let it out in fresh and exciting ways, and the best way to do that is to know your soul well. Ask not who you want to be, but who you are. Ask not what you want to create, but what you have already created. Ask not how you can best be supported, but how you can best support your soul!