The struggle to be creative and to share it with the world.

This blog is a personal blog, unlike the Bible Observations blog. Because this is more personal, I don’t really pressure myself to post every day. Sometimes, though, I want to write and be creative. A lot of the time, what I really get the urge to have the feeling of typing on a computer and have the feeling of the flow of ideas from my mind to the computer screen.

That is not a bad thing. It’s just that most of the time I don’t really have any ideas and don’t have enough creativity in me to get started. I want the feeling of being productive and writing a worthwhile post, but I don’t necessarily have the substance to go along with that desire. 

Sometimes I start writing, and then I get the flow of ideas. Most of the time I don’t think that it is enough. There is a mental feedback that comes up like clockwork. It comes from the childhood programming that I was dealt with by my mother. It gives all that it can give: “What you have is not good. No one wants to read that. It is not meaningful enough for the idea to be worth writing about. Don’t even try.”

Half of the battle of writing something, of producing something with a certain degree of creativity, is about quieting and ignoring those voices in my mind that I was programmed to have. Something that might take a person without that programming 5-10 minutes to do takes me 20-30 minutes to accomplish. It is a battle that plagues me from the moment that I have the desire to do something creative… and it doesn’t leave. Not even after I publish it.

I always have the tendency to think that people’s reaction to what I produce is always going to be negative. Part of that childhood programming. When I finally post something, it is done as an act of risk. I post something despite all of the internal messages of negativity that comes out of that programming. I may know rationally that something I write is worth posting, but it doesn’t matter. The programming causes fear of disrupting the external world in a negative way and I end up choosing to disrupt my internal world instead. I suffer the effects of not pursuing what that desire is and letting the biological energy dissipate without being used. It is a shame.

Not everything is due to that childhood programming, though. I also realize that I get distracted… a lot. That doesn’t help matters. I have to force myself to have ultimate silence to then be able to focus on my ideas and focus on writing it down. I can’t do more than one thing at a time, so that explains why a lot of ideas stay as… ideas. I get them but I don’t always have the discipline to write them down as soon as I get them. 

I never really developed the discipline to write things down, much less with the intention of it being published because whenever I shared something as a child, it was met with negativity. Now as an adult, I have been slowly and painfully trying to re-educate myself into having a more positive attitude about myself and the potential impact that I could have in the world.

I might never be perfect. This is something that I might always struggle with. I may show something and think it is crap, and then I am met with feedback that I am doing exactly what I was meant to be doing. That is shocking to me. I never really experience that. It is always hard to believe that it is true and genuine. Hopefully, I can learn to internalize that good feedback better than I internalized the bad one as a child. Hopefully, I can re-train myself to have a more healthy perspective of myself, and the self-efficacy to produce more and publish more.

What it means to become an adult?

• Paying bills.
• Doing taxes with enough time left so you don’t do a long line.
• Work… enough to make an acceptable living. I don’t mean acceptable based on what society states but acceptable for you.
• You start to do deep cleaning a few times a year.
• You learn about banking suddenly and on your own… unless you were lucky enough to have someone to teach you the ropes.
• You cook more. Again, unless you were lucky to have someone to teach you how to cook, you had to learn it on your own.
• You become more mindful for where your money goes.
• You set your priorities in life… and they are your own.
• You test out whether your upbringing was really as great as your parents try to sell that it is. I will save you the suspense. It always has a weak point.
• You start to accept the reality that there are some things that your parents tried to change in the past that are NEVER going to change. You learn to live with it.
• You start to realize the things that are better for you to do that deviates from how your parents did things… and start to feel no shame in living your lifestyle.
• You start to realize that you are more similar and different that your parents than you originally thought.
• You start to realize that you are getting old and that means making lifestyle changes to improve your health.
• You start to be grateful for the health that you have because, even if it is not the best, we know that it could be worse.
• You start to ask yourself the questions about relationships, family, and other aspects of personal and life developments.
• You start to realize the reality of generational differences from the perspective of having generations above you and below you.
• Your perspective about life changes as you take more responsibilities and achieve more “independence”.
• You start to question how independent is being independent from your parents really is.

Thoughts regarding recent interactions with my supervisor.

As I write this sentence, I have no idea how to tittle this post. I do know what I want to talk about.

At work, I have had internal conflict with who my supervisor represents ever since the first staff meeting. I noticed how the group dynamics changed when my supervisor was there. To me, it felt that there was a difference in personality between who my supervisor was and who the rest of the unit where. With every thing that I saw my supervisor do, I felt that this suspicion was being confirmed.

My supervisor would make remarks about my quiet, and reserved nature. What I perceived was that my supervisor thought of who I am as inappropriate. I knew better, but I wasn’t okay with my supervisor’s remarks because of what the comments represent in an extroverted ideal society.

So I can’t put her at fault for my subjective interpretation of what her comments meant, but the reality is that it rarely matters what she means. What matters is what I think. This is true when the roles get inverted.

This week, I have realized that what my supervisor wants out of me is to better the skills that I need to be a good Health Educator. The delivery of that message sucks. The problem with her delivery in this case is that one shouldn’t go straight to the crappy parts of another person without outlining their strengths… and after stating the things to work on emphasize that working on the weaknesses have the benefit of making the other person better, not only at their job but at life.

I know that I can make this… mental gymnastic because I have been through enough of these process to know how to analyze these interactions from all sides. This process takes a while, because I have to work with my emotional reactions as well as my analytical nature (something that my supervisor doesn’t accept as good and necessary for me).

I have dealt with enough people that manifest these opinions to recognize the patterns. Usually, I stay away from these people because I know that they are toxic to me. I can’t stay away from my supervisor. So I have to learn how to manage these situations.

What will I do with this information?

1. Thank God for the process and the results.
2. Not talk about this unless the situation demands it.
3. Have the best perspective when dealing with the supervisor’s input, understanding that even though it doesn’t always seem like it she does want me to be better at my profession.
4. Keep being myself, but look to better myself with each thing that happens. That is the healthiest thing that I can do.