We Are More Than What We Do
We Are More Than What We Do
On the multitudes of being creative.
Welcome to Creative Fuel, a newsletter about the intersection of creativity and everyday life.
If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, which gets you the weekend edition AND 24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being which starts on December 1. I’ll be sending more info on this soon, but in the meantime, if you’ve been debating on getting a paid subscription now is the time.
It’s business card making season. Yes, “making.”
At some point several years ago I was heading into the holiday selling season, and I decided it might be nice to include a little handmade thing in each package. I grabbed a large piece of watercolor paper and filled it with trees. I cut them into small pieces, and hand-wrote my website on the back. Every single package I sent out that November and December had one of these. I must have made hundreds.
I’ve done it every year since.
As my own creative business has grown, I’ve had to change the way I do a lot of things to make things more “efficient,” a little more easy. “Streamline” is probably the businessy term some would use. But there are certain things that I don’t want to give up. The handmade business cards in packages is one of them.
This year I decided to do a small block carving of a tree instead. Could I make a carving or a papercut, scan it, and get numerous copies printed? Of course. Does making handmade business cards take time. Also, of course. But do I want to have some time spent creating something handmade? Yes. It’s one of those things I don’t want to give up.
I want to be a person who makes things.
“Creativity belongs to the artist in each of us. To create means to relate. The root meaning of the word art is to fit together and we all do this every day. Not all of us are painters but we are all artists. Each time we fit things together we are creating–whether it is to make a loaf of bread, a child, a day.”
- Corita Kent
A common question we probably all have asked and been asked: “What do you do?”
What are we actually asking here?
“What do you do for fun?”
“What do you do when you’re bored?”
“What do you do on a sunny Saturday morning?”
“What do you do to get through the dark of winter?”
“What do you do when you really want to eat pie but there’s no pie in the house?”
One could dream. No, of course the question is “what do you do for work?” Which is a polite way of asking, “what do you do for money?”
I don’t mind being asked “what do you do for work?” because at least it’s specific in nature: we’re naming what we’re really after. I happen to enjoy learning about different people’s professions. But as we all know, this doesn’t tell a full story of who a person is, and a conversation solely about work can get dreary.
It also puts the emphasis on the production/output part of their lives. Which is why I dislike “what do you do?” almost as much as “how much time did that take?”
Imagine you’re at a dinner party and introduced to a stranger, who asks, “what do you do?” and you respond with one of these more poetic answers:
I dream.
I create.
I imagine.
I ask questions.
I connect.
I think.
I laugh.
I exist.
I like to come up with all sorts of answers that are factually true but don’t actually paint a full picture (because those are the parameters the question set up in the first place). This time of year, here are some answers:
I ship packages.
I do a bad job at bookkeeping.
I respond to customer service emails.
I keep track of inventory.
Judgmental as it may be, I would already be bored talking with me.
We are more than what we do. Remember: we are human beings, not human doings. I can’t remember who that line is attributed to, but I appreciate the sentiment.
Whether your creativity manifests in your professional life or your personal life—or both—I think we can all feel the discomfort in the simplistic terms of having to define what we do, and by proxy, who we are.
I’ve been attending a workshop with
and she reminded me this week of the traits of creative personalities as defined by the “father of flow” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. With decades worth of research experience on creativity and creative people, as he put it, “they contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an ‘individual,’ each of them is a ‘multitude.’”A few examples:
Creative people tend to have high physical energy, but they need a lot of rest.
They combine a light an playful attitude with a sense of discipline, or “responsibility and irresponsibility.”
They go between a place of imagination and rooted in reality.
They’re rebellious and conservative.
If any of these resonate for you, no wonder it’s incredibly difficult to feel like we have to find a singular definition for ourselves: we are all over the place by definition!
“I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Visualize a big cardboard box that you’re trying to cram all kinds of things into. You keep trying to push everything into the box, but inevitably, a few things keep popping out. And the duct tape is nowhere to be found. What you’re trying to put in the box can’t be contained by it.
I made this papercut many years ago to demonstrate this:
I feel like these questions become even more pressing for me this time of year, as I get on the holiday production and marketing train at full speed. I appreciated
’s thoughts recently on promoting work, and thinking of it more as a fun creative experiment than drudgery. also wrote about marketing and branding this past week:“I don’t love the idea of human beings being labelled ‘brands’. It’s pretty weird and yucky. I think being treated like a ‘brand’ over the past few years by corporations and agencies contributed to me getting badly burnt out.”
Yes! That’s the really nice thing about being a human: we are not a brand.
However, as Gannon points out, having an understanding who you are and what you do is useful, particularly if you are running your own business. As she says, “treat it as a creative act.”
What can easily become uncomfortable in this work of bridging creativity and business is that it’s so easy for us to lose ourselves in the process.
“When a person aspires to be a brand, they forfeit everything that is truly glorious about being human. Building any brand requires consensus. When we position ourselves as a brand, we are forced to project an image of what we believe most people will approve of and admire and buy into,” writes Debbie Millman. “The moment we cater our creativity to popular opinion is the precise moment we lose our freedom and autonomy.”
As humans, we’re constantly shifting and shaping our own identities, a push/pull between our own internal feelings and external inputs and demands. We’re social beings after all. Anyone who spends time in the digital space, whether it’s for work or not, is impacted by this, and it can come at a serious cost.
“The last thing we want is for the audience to stifle, control, or capture the creator. This is happening every waking second, for every single person who engages online. It’s killing our creativity and risking our integrity,” says
author of Audience Capture.
If you’re a working artist, you’re constantly walking this line. Even if you’re not a working artist, if you share any kind of creative work in the digital space, you’re walking this line. It can be exhausting.
“One for me, one for the algorithm,” as Karen X Cheng puts it. Which I think is applicable in all kinds of ways when you’re running a business that’s dependent on your creative work and output, or just sharing work. One for me, one to share. One for me, one for the client. One for me, one to pay the bills.
Creativity asks this of us: take it seriously, but not too seriously.
Remember, “responsibility and irresponsibility.” Which I think is a good reminder that we have to strike a balance between the outer and the inner focus. After all, creativity often requires us to be a channel. We can’t ask too much of it—all we can do is set the conditions for it to flourish.
If the expectations are too rigid, too defined, we restrict those conditions. Even worse: if we create only what we think other people will want, or what we think will do well, or what we think is “in line” with a marketing plan or a brand, we’re at risk of disappointing ourselves in the process.
Creativity is about far more than what we do or what we make, it is about who we are. Which is why it deserves our greatest attention.
After all, we’re just being human. It’s society that offered us a rigidly built box and asked us to put ourselves in it.
-Anna
"There's something in opera that we can't know necessarily from reading books about people, which is that some of the things that people do that we think about and admire later were a little terrifying to them at the time, or they didn't discuss what a big leap it was for them in public. So there's power when you can write a poem about doubt and anxiety and put it to music — then everybody can go there because we've all experienced that." Librettist Thulani Davis on the new Malcom X opera.
I’m doing
’s Essay Camp. Maybe you want to join in?Been listening to Miles Davis’ Doo-Bop album this week.
A table in every room to cultivate creativity, à la Ruth Asawa. (thank you
)
I’m one of 12 featured speakers at the Multifaceted Summit put on by my friend Britta GreenViolet. It’s virtual, you can join from anywhere, and it’s all about bringing all your tools to the table in your work. Kicks off on November 6th and it’s free to sign up.
I’m teaching two virtual papercutting workshops in December with the Nordic Museum: December 3rd and December 12th
Over at Creative Fuel Collective we’re hosting Personal Finance Workshop for Creative Humans. If money is uncomfortable for you, this is probably worth taking!
