Be Your Own Creature

This creature is very sensitive; he has always felt different than the people around him. He has long arms and short legs that make him feel different than everyone else, but his long arms make it easy for him to reach out for others and hug them. He has a lot of love and emotion to give, but he can be really shy. He also is really messy (hence the mess on the floor all around him) and people didn’t take him seriously because they thought he was just goofy and messy and sensitive. He loves to take care of things which is why he has his very own creature that he is holding, because in a way, he wants to give the love to others that he hoped to receive himself.

In order to feel nurtured he needs to be seen for who he really is, he needs people to spend quality time with him, he needs people to listen to what he has to say and take him seriously, not just like a cute creature. But at the same time, he feels nurtured when people trust him enough to joke around with him and make fun of him. When they trust him enough to be real with him.

In order to feel safe he needs people to be vulnerable and show their flaws. He doesn’t feel safe when he feels like he is the only one with insecurities and flaws. He doesn’t feel safe when he feels like he always needs to have things figured out and be put together. He doesn’t feel safe when he feels that people are being fake and not real. He feels safe when people embrace themselves, and him, for who they truly are, flaws and all.

This creature has an insane capacity to feel and see other people’s emotions. He is really in touch with himself and with the people around him. He is really goofy and likes to joke, he can connect with anyone, he makes others feel safe because he is not afraid to be vulnerable and allow them to be who they truly are. He allows others to let their guard down because he loves and accepts people simply for being themselves.

His greatest challenge is that he’s actually really shy. He can be really vulnerable with people and will open up to them about his life, but he still has trouble actually SHOWING them who he is. And while he loves connecting with people he is afraid to go up to people and initiate contact with them because he fears rejection and doesn’t want to “be a bother”. His greatest struggle is being fully comfortable showing people that he is goofy and messy even though he so badly wants to be vulnerable and connect and wants others to do the same for him. He also struggles greatly with feeling understood, and often feels lonely in his experience of the world. The amount he feels within others is his greatest gift, but it can also be extremely overwhelming and painful, especially in a world that values performance over realness, appearing put together over sensitivity, and shutting out our emotions over being truly vulnerable. He also is messy and disorganized and struggles to finish projects, which makes it hard for him to feel like he can accomplish the things he wants in life.

His dream is to simply show the world that to be your messy, vulnerable, authentic and emotional self are actually our greatest strengths, not weaknesses. That every individual’s uniqueness is the most precious thing that they have, so be okay showing who you really are, be okay not being perfect, put together, or happy all the time, that’s where your true beauty lies. People think strength, happiness and resilience come from being strong, happy and resilient all the time, but strength, happiness and resilience actually come from letting yourself be real, have pain, have real emotion, break down and gathering yourself to then grow stronger. You gain strength through breaking down, you gain happiness by feeling and getting through your pain, you gain resilience from repeating this process over and over again and understanding that even if you break down you have always continued to get back up again. The only way out of your pain and discomfort and weakness is actually going through it, because you can’t get the rainbow without the rain. He wants to show the world this simply through the way he is, the way he carries himself, the way he talks to others, he wants to share his story through dialogue and through writing, he wants to be a therapist that aids others to stay connected to themselves even and especially through their pain, to love and appreciate themselves fully so they can become strong and resilient humans who live meaningful and connected lives.

Today we had an assignment for my creative arts in social work class. The assignment was to create a creature out of clay and give him a backstory:

A brief history

What it needs to feel nurtured, safe, loved and accepted

What are its strengths and challenges

What are its dreams and goals for the future

I’m sure you’ve recognized, the creature is me. I’m the creature. When I first read this assignment I couldn’t help but laugh because I literally refer to myself as a creature, well more accurately Tal refers to me as a creature and I took the name as my own. If you ask Tal where the nickname “The creature” came from he’ll say it’s cause “you’re creaturely.” And what exactly does creaturely mean? Well in the time I’ve known him, this is what I’ve gathered that he means by “a creature”: He met me while he worked at Holmes Place and instead of being a girl that looked all nice and put together at the gym I was that girl who was in the gym working really hard, panting, dripping sweat everywhere, doing burpees on the disgusting floor and getting my shirt all dirty. One of the first things he told me was that I look like I just got back from a bootcamp because I was so sweaty and dirty and then one of my shirts that had permanent grey stains on it everywhere became known as my “bootcamp shirt.” I would literally have dirt all over my hands and under my nails, never had my nails done, never did my makeup, walked around with wet hair and athletic clothes basically at all times. Was always running to things because I never allowed myself proper time to get there, I am really disorganized, I don’t plan anything, I am messy, I am creative, I am short and strong, I’m a tomboy, I love to be messed with, made fun of, and pushed around. I literally got sad when he stopped playing pranks on me and feel so much love when I get eggs cracked on my head and salt in my water, (I guess thanks to having two older brothers?) , I prefer eating with my hands than with utensils, the list goes on but you get the gist, but also I am full of emotions, I’m deeply sensitive but I have lots of love to give, but having lots of love to give doesn’t mean creatures don’t bite. Coming with lots of emotions and being sensitive also means dealing with your own hard emotions and not always being so nice, I can also be incredibly blunt, harsh, and well, sometimes, I bite. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that these became qualities of “a creature”?

But I adopted the name because I have to admit, it’s just incredibly accurate, and I felt incredibly seen when he called me it, so here we are, one small messy empathetic creature.

Anyway, this assignment was just really close to my heart. I didn’t have any plan for my creature (I know, big surprise) but that is exactly the whole point of creative arts therapy. You aren’t supposed to have a plan, you just create based on how you are feeling and see what comes up. The goal isn’t the outcome, the goal is the process of it and letting yourself see what comes up when you have no goal and you have no care about what you make, this is when true emotions and thoughts actually begin to surface. So I started with just making a ball of clay for the body, and then I just began rolling big long logs and I thought I want these to be the arms because they symbolize him reaching out for the world, being exposed, raw, vulnerable and open to others. I then made him with short and stubby legs because I’m also short and “sturdy,” but also because I wanted to make him look funny and feel different from the outside world, because we all have qualities that make us feel “goofy,” “weird,” or “unique.” Then I made him have a little curl at the top of his head, because after all he is me. He then needed fingers so he could grab out for others and connect. But his fingers made me think that he actually really just wants something of his own to take care of and give love to, so I made him his own little creature that he is holding on to. The last part was his face. I wanted to make his eyes really big and wide, with emotion and depth, because he has so many feelings behind those eyes and he wants people to see into his soul and he also wants to see into others’ souls. Lastly I made him have a small soft smile, because he is warm and inviting to others, but he can also be shy, so his soft smile shows he’s open but he still doesn’t want to show all of the parts of himself and completely overwhelm others. He wants them still to have space for themselves to feel comfortable being them; he doesn’t want to take up all the room.

I want to share this for a lot of different reasons. The first and most obvious reason is because I want to share my story because, as you can tell, I think my purpose in life is to be as vulnerable as I possibly can to make others feel okay doing the same and just talking about the things that I think so many of us avoid talking about because not doing that is the very thing that brought me so much pain and loneliness and disconnection from myself and others. I think our society suffers greatly from not allowing ourselves to be fully seen and vulnerable and that comes from a lack of safety around doing so, so I just really want to normalize these things because I truly believe this is how we stay connected to ourselves and to the lives we are actually meant to live.

The second reason I want to share is because I really want to talk about the power of creative arts therapy. My entire “empathetic creature” Substack, website, Instagram, purpose, way of being, whatever the hell you want to call it, revolves around this stuff. It revolves around healing through creative arts therapy because for me it has been the most powerful thing. To share my story, my emotions, my insights through writing, poetry and art. I do it because it’s something I so strongly believe in for every single person.

It’s the reason I wanted to show you this process. When we let ourselves simply just be and create without needing it to be put together, without having a plan, going into things with curiosity, with connecting to ourselves and meeting ourselves where we are at RIGHT NOW, this is what allows us to express our emotions in a way that we often struggle to otherwise.

In a way it gives us this sort of “separation” from the difficult emotions themselves. To be able to think in metaphors, to create cartoons that symbolize what you feel, to create a poem just from the first things that come to mind, to be able to create a “creature” that isn’t actually you, these are all things that allow you to more easily talk about your emotions and struggles and for you to literally even just get a window into your own emotions. Often we don’t even know what is happening inside of us, and our brain has so many defenses that it doesn’t actually allow us to know what is happening inside of it as a way of protecting ourselves from pain. Creative arts is sort of like an entry into ourselves. It’s like our brain blocks us from entering through the front door, the front door being sitting down and talking directly about our emotions and being able to fully verbalize them let alone even be aware of them, but creative arts is a way of entering into our brains, but through the back sliding door that was left unlocked. We need to get in there in order to sort out our problems, and our messy house, but sometimes the front door is locked and we don’t have a key, so this is such a creative solution, and it truly truly works.

And this is also why I don’t believe creativity is a personality trait; we all possess it. Creativity is connected to our emotions, and our emotions come up when we sit with ourselves where we are in presence and nonjudgment and let the truth surface no matter what it is.

The “creative people” always seem to be the ones that are “free spirits,” messy, disorganized, emotional. It’s not a coincidence. It’s because perfectionism and rigidity KILL creativity. It kills allowing ourselves to have true emotions, to be curious and explore with nonjudgment. The second we stop fighting ourselves and meet ourselves where we’re at, the second we can have real emotions, and with real emotions comes creativity.

Which is also the very reason why mushrooms and psychedelics can give us this sense of creativity and why I think they are another amazing avenue into our locked houses, but that I will save for another rant.

What I want to end it with for right now is this:

The creature is not just me, and I’m not just the creature, the creature is actually all of us. We all have traits that make us “creaturely,” uniquely us, that are not always the most “normal” or “accepted,” but that doesn’t make them bad, it actually makes them incredibly special gifts. So I just want to invite everyone to be their own unique creature.

The poem, the piece of writing, the feeling you didn’t know you had, the insight that comes up, the creature that comes out, those are all things lying inside of you, and they are hidden, but they are gems, and hidden gems require some digging, but they are always there, lying underneath some dirt. The gem is somewhere hiding in that “mess,” not despite it, but inside it, and you have to be willing to get your hands dirty to find it. So if you want to find your own hidden gems you have to be okay with doing some digging, getting a little messy, and maybe ending up with some dirt under your nails, like a true creature.