Creativity

or does there have to be joy in self-expression?

october 7th, 2025

I feel like my words have failed me. I write for pages, for hours, for tapes flipped back to front to back and walk away feeling like I haven’t said anything. Haven’t even scratched the surface. I assemble portraits of myself as various monsters, a flaming unicorn with a bow and a cock, a horned furry beast, a screaming cat, jaws missing, teeth crooked and dripping. It feels good to have paper yielding under my pen, my scissors, my fingers. but I don’t know if I’ve said anything.

I sit on the floor with a hot glue gun, my spouse’s, using glue from a big bag they purchased in 2020 according to the tag, likely because I’d used up a lot of their glue sticks before we’d dated, sitting on the floor of their apartment making wreaths, gluing eyeballs to canvas, not burning my fingertips the way I had as a child.

I’ve got this stupid idea that my art needs to mean something and that I should know exactly what. Is it preciousness? my refusal to share, my desire to be unseen? Or helplessness? a certainty that if I don’t know the point there must not be one.

Creativity. I express myself often in quiet rooms where no sound can escape.

Guilt. How do I not have anything to say at a “time like this”?

Self-importance. I must express what is happening.

Self-martyrdom. How can I be hot gluing pony beads to a foam pumpkin at a time like this?!

Embarrassment. Imagining people ask my spouse- your husband does what all day?

Embarrassment. people I’m estranged from seeing that maybe I’m still not where I want to be because the goal posts keep changing. Because I am always looking for something to look for.

I feel like I have failed my words, hundreds of thousands of them. Did they beg to be written to line notebooks, to punctuate crude drawings, to sit as drafts in a bin of things I’ve moved on from?

Creativity as self-expression, as breathing, as brushing teeth and getting dressed. A reflection of the times. I see myself demonized in the news and politics and draw myself, imagine myself as a monster to be afraid of. an illusion or narrative of self-control. I curate. I hold tightly.

If your prose is in a notebook you only briefly skimmed over, are you a writer?

If your art is sitting on your desk, waiting for the next phase, where it still might never be shared, are you an artist?

I don’t think of myself as a sleeper, eater or shitter either, but I do all of those just as naturally. What of myself is for others? a pile of googly eyes and sticky fingers. offcuts of prints I toss in the big recycling bin, someone can see the color theory while digging for cans with redemption marks. and I can keep asking myself,

Do I like the self I have curated?