I’ve never considered myself a creative person. I don’t do crafts, sew, or bake like my sisters. I love looking at art, but I’ve never tried creating it. In college I started working toward a degree in business—like my dad—then switched to become a teacher—like my mom. In teaching, I did exercise some creativity, but still never thought of myself as a creative.

As I confess in my last blog post, when I first started writing, I couldn’t refer to myself a writer because I feared being called a fraud. I wasn’t trained as a writer. I hadn’t written anything notable (besides term papers and comparison essays in school), and I didn’t think anyone even read the blog posts I put on the company website about heating oil vs. natural gas, or why furnace maintenance is important. If no one reads your work, are you even a writer?

Now, I understand that I have always been creative, I just let my fear get in the way. I also understand where both my fear, and my courage to pursue come from. Like the classic good vs evil image, we all have a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. Fear (or the devil) would tell me I wasn’t good enough, I had no credibility, and I’m not creative. I had started working on a big project—writing a book—but fear kept kicking me back.

Still, I kept feeling a nudge. The angel (or for me I call it God) kept bringing me back. Finally, I decided I didn’t really care if no one read my work—In fact, that would actually be better. If no one read it, it didn’t matter if it was terrible or not qualified. At last, I had a hall pass. It was my green light, as Brooke Warner writes in her book, Green Light Your Book. I wanted to write because I wanted to write. I wanted to write for my kids, so that one day they would understand their legacy as it begins with their great, great grandparents. I also wanted to write it for my dad, who really, really wanted me to write that book (and also kept nudging me, as dads do).  

So, every day, before I sat down to work, I battled that devil on one shoulder by channeling the angel on my other shoulder. I prayed for enough motivation, enough courage, enough time, enough space, enough stick-to-it-iv-ness, to just get a few words on the page today. Fear still crept in—sometimes a little and sometimes a lot—but with prayer, faith, and by the grace of God, I found the strength, the words, the humility, and the courage to keep writing.

It has been a long five years to get published, and I’m not quite there yet. But in my journey to get there, I have learned that I am a creative person. In Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, she talks about how we are all creative beings just because we are human. Creativity looks different for everyone. It can be artistic like music, or functional such as architecture, but we all possess it by nature, and we don’t need a degree or a permission slip to live into that label. I do think fear (or the devil) will always try to smother my creativity, but I will just keep reminding myself that the angel (or God) is on the other shoulder, that my creativity just needs to be cultivated, and that my God is bigger than I previously gave him credit for.