Creativity Therapy Part 2

Finding Ourselves

I don't know your story, only mine, and I'm not a certified therapist, so this won't be about me giving you advice.  Instead, I will share my own experience over the years.

I think it takes a long time for some of us to "find ourselves", to really know ourselves.  For me it was over 50 because all those years before that I was looking after other people, trying to keep up with societal demands, i.e.; working to keep food on the table, raising a son alone and trying to please an unhappy parent.  

Through it all, however, the creativity was always there.  It's been with me since birth.  I just saw things differently than others, I was pretty sure I was the weird one early on.

I was a sickly kid.  I had a congenital kidney stricture that was not diagnosed until I was 13 years old, so I was sick in bed, a lot.  I had to find things to do while laying in bed.  We didn't have a TV, so I read, learned macrame and wrote poetry, among other things.

Later I got a camera and began taking pictures as a way of expressing myself, frustrated at not being able to draw.  

Photography stayed with me over the years, and is still a driving creative force within me today.

So I think you have to look back over your life, evaluate where you were, what you did, and mostly what you loved doing.

I'd like to think that that thing we're here to do has been with us all along, maybe we just don't know it until we really dig deep inside ourselves.

Another key element in finding ourselves - and again, I express this from my own experience - is to not look at your outer environment, the outer world, for clues, because that's a trap.  The world sucks you in with shiny new things you should buy, expensive educations they sold us, and glamorous looking people they told you you should be.

Strip all that away and that's the real you, the one you are when nobody's looking.

Up next, Part 3, The Therapy.