Conceptual Creativity Hangover

This is what you are experiencing when your brain could be a menu item at KFC and your apartment looks a lot like what your mother used to call “(bebe Me)’s Studio” because bless her heart, she didn’t quite know what to make of this little girl who could blithely exist within 10 feet of a seemingly unorganized explosion of paper, pencils, markers, crayons, glue, scissors and the like that took up an entire corner of the bedroom. (In the grown-up version, there is also a beautiful white macbook precariously balanced on top.)

But this weekend, as I cleaned up the residue of paper scraps, books and dried up glue sticks, while nursing the mouse-clicking induced pain in the tip of my index finger and my throbbing headache from the Last-week-of-class sleep deprivation, it hit me. I really am in the right place at the right time. Right about this time last year, I would wake up every morning with a heartful of reluctance and a stomachful of dread. My brain cells were swiftly withering away, having given up on any opportunities for ideation in ways other than figuring out how to keep my bitchiness at bay as I tried to differently word the same bourgeois platitudes to each unsuspecting client I encountered during each excruciating second of each agonizing 8-hour day.

A year later, I just finished 5 weeks of Creative Strategies and its slew of assignments during which I could easily spend 9 straight hours in flow*, ideating at last, with words and images in my own voice and sense of humor as I slowly began to understand and foster creativity in an even bigger way than looking pretty and sounding funny. Add in the fact that I got to use the topic of teen fiction to finally understand how to do proper academic research and I’d say that I’m looking at something for which it is absolutely worth waking up in the morning. Maybe it’s a result of my efforts and patience, maybe it’s luck. In any case, God is being especially good to me right now and my brain and I are feeling thankful for this blessing of a conceptual creativity hangover. Pain and all.

* defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (I know, I know, but it’s somewhat impossible to be a grad student without sounding just a little bookish) as an activity that involves “painful, risky, difficult activities that stretched the person’s capacity and involved an element of novelty and discovery” and “the feeling when things were going well as an almost automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness”