I Think I Can't...oops...

Over lunch yesterday I was watching a recorded episode of Simply Quilts, and Alex's special guest was someone who does a lot of work with batiks. She was walking us through a relatively simple pattern for a quilt done with batiks, and I was thinking, "That's pretty--I could easily do that. Maybe I'll go online and download the pattern."

Just a few minutes later, Alex had the guest talk about some other quilts she'd brought along with her: a wide variety of patterns, although all using batiks. I haven't entirely been bitten by the batik bug yet--just a little bit nibbled--but I was struck by the beauty of the way the guest had put colors together and how she'd used relatively simple block patterns that really highlighted this unique fabric. Looking at one particularly nice one, I thought, "Boy, I wish I could figure out how to do stuff like that. I'm not good at that kind of thing."

Uh, what?

I stopped at the realization of what a negative message I'd just sent myself.

OK, here's where I give you a little backstory. I have led workshops and written program sessions on creativity. I have been invited as a guest speaker at women's events and asked specifically to speak on creativity. I've written countless articles (mostly for women and girls) on creativity. My saying is, "Creativity is only looking at something in a new way." My pet peeve is women who say they're not creative, and I expend a tremendous amount of my personal and professional energy in trying to help them see otherwise.

And yet my first thought when looking at someone else's creativity is, "I can't do that."

Doh.

Of course I can. I just have to get over myself. I do normally think of myself as a creative person--although my creativity tends to show itself in much more pragmatic ways. I'm able to view problems creatively, set up creative organizational structures for groups...basically, I'm able to look at things in a new way and help people find new ways to address issues. But artistic creativity has often felt like a completely different thing for me, and an area in which I'm less confident in my abilities.

I vividly recall my mother once saying to someone, "Oh, I'm not creative", completely discounting the several stacks of beautiful quilts she had made over the years. But simply because she typically followed patterns rather than designing her own, she saw what she did as something less than creative. And yet she took those patterns and made them her own--used her own fabric choices, tweaked sizes, or block placement, or border treatments--what turned out was not just a carbon copy of what the designer had originally created. And yet my Mom didn't see what she'd done as creative. And might I also comment here, raising 5 kids and several foster kids on limited budget and in a self-built house and subsistence farm in the country required a tremendous amount of creativity!

I realized a few years back that my admiration for my Mom's creativity and my sadness that she couldn't see that in herself is quite a bit of what has inspired me to preach the word of creativity to women and girls today. I firmly believe that a lot of women have been trained to see what we do as "less than"--we do crafts, not create art; we have hobbies, not artistic passions. We are very quick to discount our own talents and explain them away as something that's not really all that and a bag of chips. And that's why my knee-jerk-reaction to what I was watching on the television--"Oh, I can't do that, I'm not that creative"--really surprised me. Dang it, practice what you preach, girl.

Why is it that we relegate artistic creativity to the experts? Why do we relegate anything to the experts? How does someone become an expert, anyway? I'm not knocking artists--there are several quilt artists whose quilts I pore over in fascination and try to learn everything I can from seeing how they put fabric, stitches, and embellishment together. But why is it that I see what they do as something so completely removed from what I do?

I have to remind myself to change the tape in my head from "I wish I could" to "I want to--how do I get there?" and from "I can't do that" to "Gosh, I could do that. What do I need to learn to get to that place?"

I have often gotten called in as computer tech support for various members of my extended family and a fair number of people I work with. They all know I spend the better part of my life on my computer and use a wide variety of software, so they call or email me with questions. Most of the time, I can figure out their issues and help them solve them. One of them said to me once, "I'm sorry, but I've never been trained on any of this." To which I responded, "Neither have I. I'm just intensely curious, and positive that any software I buy should be able to do what I need it to do, so I just keep poking away at it until I figure it out."

I'm not afraid of computers, so I'm able to work easily with them. After watching the Simply Quilts episode yesterday and thinking through all of this, I realized I had to apply the same thinking to quilting. It's only fabric. So what if I screw something up? I can always try again. No one ever needs to see it. If I even end up throwing it out, is that such a big deal? And it's not nearly as expensive to replace as a crashed computer!

So I'm planning on embarking on a journey of getting over myself. Stop thinking in terms of "cans" and "can'ts" and thinking instead of "hows" and "let's trys". There is no such thing as failure...it's all "a learning experience". And if some projects end up hitting the trash can, that's just a good excuse to make another trip to my favorite local quilt store, isn't it? How can I lose?