What Is Scary About Creativity?
One of the most common things I hear when people learn that I offer expressive arts and clay therapy is:
“I’m not creative.”
Over the years, I’ve become less interested in answering that statement with, “Everyone is creative,” “You don’t need to be artistic,” or “It’s not about making art,” and more interested in the question behind it.
What feels scary about creativity?
Perhaps the answer lies in an old art classroom.
Take a moment and remember yours. What messages did you receive? Were you praised for being artistic and then expected to perform in every class? Were you compared to other students? Were you placed into the category of “not creative”?
Many of us carry those labels much longer than we realize.
Creativity becomes tied to judgment, performance, comparison, and the fear of getting it wrong.
We also live in a culture that treats almost everything as a skill to be measured rather than a human capacity to be lived. We expect creativity to be productive, reliable, and available on demand.
But creativity rarely works that way.
Like life, it moves in cycles. It expands and contracts. It disappears and returns. Like grief, love, healing, and many other meaningful parts of being human, it does not respond well to pressure.
Perhaps what feels uncomfortable is not creativity itself, but entering into a relationship with something that cannot be fully controlled.
I’ll leave you with that thought.
Warmly,
Anna
