Up until college, I never thought I was creative. I thought it was one of those things that you either were born with a talent for it, or you weren’t. And I just accepted that I would never make art.

Art class was always my least favorite. It felt like pulling teeth. If our teacher gave us any creative freedom in a project, I struggled. Give me a rubric and tell me exactly how I can get a good grade and I’m golden. Tell me to use my own imagination and creativity to make the project my own, I felt screwed.

I would get so frustrated because I felt like I couldn’t achieve my teacher’s expectation and make something perfect if she didn’t give me specific instructions. I was jealous of the kids who could just come up with unique ideas and concepts for their creations. It just seemed to so easily flow to them, meanwhile I would psych myself out, seemingly mess us, and start over time and time again. I excelled in almost every other aspect of my academic career aside from the arts, and my perfectionism couldn’t handle being “bad” at something. So naturally, I stopped taking any form of art as soon as I was allowed to create my own schedule.

By the time college acceptances starting coming in, I still didn’t quite know what I wanted to study. I applied to many schools for their Computer Science programs…plot twist….she did not end up being a woman in STEM. I planned to go into this field to be seen as “impressive”, not because I found a love for it.

And somehow, some way, I stumbled across the major that saved me. And so my journey into finding my creativity began. And I say I “found” it because it was always there, I just had to nurture and nourish it. Like with anything, being creative is a practice. And my perfectionism had blocked me from practicing for too long.

And I was most definitely challenged in college. But not in the way I initially thought I would be.

I was challenged to make things I wasn’t proud of. I was challenged to show my professors my imperfect work. I was challenged to try out mediums I thought I’d love and ended up hating, as well as mediums I thought I’d hate and end up loving. I was challenged to collaborate creatively and step outside of my hyper independence and need for control. I was challenged to find my individualism, which I didn’t even realize I was lacking.

I’ll never forget something my professor in my final college class told us before we’d be braving the world post grad. I don’t have the exact quote, but he said something along the lines of “Waiting for inspiration to strike is for amateurs, you cultivate your own inspiration to create”. This, of course, I found to be a load of complete bogus at the time. I didn’t fully understand what he was trying to say and wrote it off as just another thing my kooky professor said (he was the best, don’t get it twisted). And while my ego hates to admit it, my professor most definitely had a point. I mean clearly he did, otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here pondering and writing about it three years later.

Creativity is within all of us. We all have ideas, some of us just don’t know how to tap into those ideas. Some of us don’t believe our ideas are worth expressing and that their art won’t matter. But I’m here to tell you that it does. And it matters because it came from you. You and I could create the same art concept upon the same medium, but it would be completely different because they each have a different story. A different reason. A different perspective.

Within the past few years of being a photographer alongside experimenting with so many other components of my creativity, I’ve realized how important it is for us to nurture it. I’m on this journey to nourish my artistic soul. Creativity is a muscle, you just need to strengthen it.