Creativeness

Morning,

I've been thinking in the last few days about creativity. A few months back my mother told me she thought I was really creative, while she had no creative bone in her body. I shushed her and laughed at her and what she'd said. On Sunday my housemate told me she thought I was very creative, and I laughed at her and her suggestion too.

This morning I was talking to a friend about the first time I used an SLR camera, and how wierd it felt. Then I remembered that out of that very same day, less than 20 minutes later I took a shot which I put up on Flickr a few days later. A complete stranger contacted me about it and asked for my permission to publish it a Schmap Guide to Cardiff. The link to that photo is here.

And it strikes me that while I'm already aware that I have major self-confidence issues at times, and I'm quite cynical, and can be quite sarcastic, I turn all of that inwards and direct it at myself first. If people think I'm harsh and bitchy, I may well be, but I have already thought it about myself first probably.

I think it's one of the reasons why I can't accept compliments. I remember reading somewhere that you should think of compliments as gifts, and everyone knows how rude it is to refuse a gift from someone right in their faces. But that's what I do. If someone tells me that I look nice, I'll either answer with 'uh, thanks' and roll my eyes, or go the other way and say 'ha, I know!'. Neither of which are exactly great responses. The first makes it obvious I think the person's lying, the second makes me seem egotistical when it's usually my way of brushing it off and moving on (but hoping it won't offend the person as much as rolling my eyes).

I know my self-esteem is crap and I would dearly love to be able to accept compliments without feeling awkward. I vividly remember a best friend in school telling me she thought I was pretty. I was high on that compliment for days, it's the first one I can remember paying any attention to and thinking it was genuine. A week or so later my skin inevitably flared up, and I burst into tears looking at myself in the mirror. Ever since then any compliments saying I look good are automatically ignored. I look awful, I know better. I don't understand how people can say it, but boy do I love it when I get a rare photo taken of me that I like! Egotistical hypocrite or what :(

I genuinely don't think I am creative. I was crap at art, at home and in school. I still can't draw or paint to save my life. I took up cardmaking because I loved the beautiful things other people could make. If I copied something I saw I could make beautiful things too, but off my own bat the results normally weren't as good.

I can knit, and I can knit fairly well. However, that's all about following a pattern. I'm a scientist, of course I can follow instructions! I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to go about free hand knitting, and there's no way anything good would come out of it. Design my own pattern?! As if!

I can take photos. And I do. I've had my work in two exhibitions (one is currently open at Reading University), been placed in a few competitions and as mentioned about had some work published online and in a photobook. And yet I don't think the pictures I take are very creative. When I think about it, some of my most popular ones are my macro shots, which can be quite abstract and creative. But if I go on Flickr and see what everyone else does I feel like the most uncreative person in the world, without a 'creative bone in her body'.

Is it seriously all from a lack of self-confidence? I think of all the mistakes I've made, the bad shots I've deleted, the number of times I've ripped and frogged my knitting, and I still don't feel that creative. I look at how people decorate their homes, and compare it to my woeful attempts to decorate a single room. I look at how others dress, and again compare. I have always compared myself to everyone else, and have always had low self-esteem.

I love the idea of one day opening my own little shop online, and being able to sell my own hand dyed yarns, possibly even own a craft shop or just be creative all day without a care in the world. I would absolutely love to be able to make a living from photography, be it photographing weddings, and being able to capture how happy people are, doing portraits of people, pets... But I hate studio sessions because I never have the guts to stand there in front of the other person and take pictures. At the PhotoSoc, studio sessions are done in a room with 30-40 people waiting their turn, with all eyes on me. I would love to be creative, and be regarded as good, but I obstruct my own way.

I don't really have a conclusion for this post. I know my self-esteem is crap and I would dearly love to be able to accept compliments without feeling awkward. I vividly remember a best friend in school telling me she thought I was pretty. I was high on that compliment for days, it's the first one I can remember paying any attention to and thinking it was genuine. A week or so later my skin inevitably flared up, and I burst into tears looking at myself in the mirror. Ever since then any compliments saying I look good are automatically ignored. I looked awful, I know better.

I don't really have a conclusion for this post. I'd like to learn to be more confident and stop faking it so much. I'm good at acting. I'd love to have the confidence in myself, and my body so that I didn't care what people said or thought. But in the meantime, I continue to preempt what the bitchiest person could say about me.

xx