This is also creative writing post #45.
Unusually for me, this is being published several days after I finished writing it. That portends a change in how I’m going to run my writing life, which I’ll explain as part of this exploration.
What am I exploring? As usual, the potential answers to a few questions on my mind. Writing is the best way to clarify my own thoughts, and always has been.
Today’s questions are:
What does creativity mean?
What makes an act creative rather than just… an act?
What does Halloween, my favorite holiday, have to do with creativity in my life?
And why is Halloween’s marriage of opposites — cute and creepy, innocent and evil — so powerful? What makes that such a rich and fertile creative soil for me?
These are questions I think about a lot. Each has come up in therapy more than once.
Creativity is deeply important to me.
It took a long time—and a lot of inner excavation—to understand why. But I’ve finally arrived at something that feels true.
Creativity matters to me for the same simple, slightly boring reason it matters to a lot of people with outlier-traumatic childhoods: it provides proof that I exist.
The root of “original” is “origin.” And if I make something original—if something exists that didn’t exist before, because I made it—then I must have been the origin of it.
Which means I must be real. I know this is weird, and confusing.
So if this is you:
then congratulations! You’re probably relatively sane.
It’s a complex-trauma thing, and I’m not going to try to explain it.
Just be glad it doesn’t resonate, and laugh.
What counts as creativity, though, turns out to be slipperier than I once believed.
Take LEGO. Here’s a picture of the Starry Night set hanging on my wall—Van Gogh in LEGO form. It’s the most challenging build I’ve ever done, and it looks incredible. The picture doesn’t do it justice.
Another favorite: Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Also gorgeous on the wall.
Is building a LEGO set like this a creative act?
Not really. It comes with precise instructions. You follow them. That’s the deal.
But last winter, when I was dangerously and seriously depressed, these LEGO builds were lifelines. I couldn’t do much of what I wanted to do. But I could sit down, use my hands, and end up with something beautiful.
Something that hadn’t existed before I started.
Let’s call that creativity-adjacent.
Before I get into creativity as mood regulation, here are a few more LEGO projects that scratched the same itch—creativity-adjacent more than creative, but still wonderful.
Decoration as An Art Form
I just (mostly) finished decorating for Halloween. Not entirely—I’ll wait to put up the Halloween tree (yes, it’s a thing, and yes, it’s awesome) until the AC unit comes out. That’s also when I will swap out the regular bedding for Halloween bedding.
But everything else is up.
Yes, it is barely past the Fourth of July.
Decorating this early sounds completely unhinged—because it kind of is. But I have a good reason.
I am, in fact, a crazy woman obsessed with seasonal decorating. And that’s because it’s the purest form I’ve found of using creativity to manage my mood.
It’s also a way of transforming my space into something expressive. It’s not just aesthetics. It’s identity made visible. It’s world-building.
It’s me on the walls, in the corners, under the lights. Helping me see and understand myself by surrounding myself with what I love.
More photos, plus a deep dive into decorating as art, and into creativity as mood management, after the paywall.
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