Embracing my identity as a multi-passionate creative: What’s my ‘thing’? I’m lacemaking with ideas and materials.

Photo by @rwlinder

Over a decade ago I wandered into a fundraising day at my local community centre. Sitting in a corner of the room was an older lady with a pillow resting in her lap. Laid on top of this was semi-circle of wooden bobbins, each attached to a fragile thread that came together in the center with a cluster of dressmaking pins to form exquisitely delicate lace.

I was memorised watching her work, because try as I might I couldn’t understand how it worked. There were spells where one group of bobbins would be in play, and sometimes it felt as though the intention was to travel in a linear way from one end of the bobbin line to the other. But then suddenly a everything would switch and a completely different group of bobbins were brought on to the pillow pitch. It was AMAZING. I was FASCINATED…for a little while.

(If you’re intrigued this wonderful video gives you an idea of what it looked like…)

I could have asked of course. But at 23 I was far too awkward to interrupt her, and anyway I didn’t want to disrupt the secret algorithm she was following in her mind. So eventually I gave up trying to decode the bobbin logic and moved on to the next stall, the lace making quickly forgotten.

Ten years on and I’ve never yet learned how to make bobbin lace, though it’s on my ‘oneday someday’ list (btw every craft is on that list). However over the years it has become a touchstone for me in trying to describe how my creativity works.

Learning to understand my own creative approach

To the outside world, a lot of what I do doesn’t make a great deal of sense. It looks muddled - a messy assemblage of teaching, coaching, illustration, book arts, miniatures, model making, animation, film-making, writing arty essays, writing self-confessional essays (this is one of those), fiction, dressmaking, knitting, puppet making, and occasionally the odd ukulele performance, interpretative dance or hoop show. And probably a bunch of other things that I’ve forgotten matter to me today but will feel essential tomorrow.

But I spent years of my life trying to find ‘my thing’.

As a teenager I thought it was photography, and then painting…until I discovered sculpture.

For some time I thought my ‘thing’ was conceptual art, because as long as you chose a topic or two no one seemed to care if you used a whole lot of different mediums.

Then I was an ‘experimental film-maker whose work explored our relationship with landscape.’

There was the period where I was obsessed with puppets as the vessel of telling stories and inspiring activism. The months I was sure I was meant to be a children’s book illustrator. The years I called myself a papercutter.

For each of these phases there was the heart-pounding conviction I had finally ‘found it’. For a little while it was all so perfectly RIGHT…every mistake, every misdirection just a part of my logical path to creative enlightenment.

But with each medium, as my skill level increased and I began to run out of resources to research, my enthusiasm would dwindle and before long the ache to find something new would come back. And each time it would be wrapped in a blanket of shame that got heavier with every cycle of excitement ebbing to boredom.

Finding a way to manage this (I thought)

Working as a freelance creative educator was a good way to navigate this.

My job was - amazingly - to come up with new ideas, to be responsive to the needs of the people I was working with, and to be able to adapt activities or ideas to meet those needs. Perfect!

I used to describe myself as carrying an imaginary suitcase full of all the creative skills and techniques I knew to each job. My role was to listen to what the people I was working with wanted. To open my suitcase and say ‘these are what I have to share with you’, and let them choose. And often to learn something new for the project that I could add into the suitcase and take to the next job.

I think this is one reason why I love being a creativity coach now - the same principles apply even if the method of delivering the experience is different. These days it’s a suitcase of ideas to share with my clients, but I’m also responding to and faciliating their unique needs.

But even when I was happiest as a creative educator, when it came to my ‘own’ art work I just couldn’t find the holy grail of an artistic practice I could commit to.

Not only was it damaging my self-esteem as I became convinced I was flaky, fickle, non-committal and even self-sabotaging, but it was impacting my ability to get paid opportunities as an artist.

My work was mostly visual storytelling - illustration, animation, book arts and theatre so it just didn’t have the mysterious arty sheen of conceptual art. As much as I tried to come across as contemporary and cool (with a minimal website where I just presented my disparate portfolio with nothing more them titles and mediums), no one seemed to be buying it - as evidenced by piles of rejection emails.

Choosing to commit creatively

It was only when I decided to ‘just finally commit and build an identity as a papercutter DAMMIT’ that I was able to shift my perspective.

Not because I forced myself to choose and it fixed the problem. But because choosing made me so very unhappy.

For a few years I chose papercutting and I followed through on that choice (erm, mostly…).

But as much as I appreciated other people’s enjoyment of my work, my love of papercutting quickly felt like a trap. I no longer wanted to make papercuts, but I was to scared to let go of everything I had worked so hard to achieve (tbh I’d only really achieved minor recognition and a lovely audience - but I valued both very much!).

I reached a point where I had no desire to make papercuts any more, but I wouldn’t let myself do other things. I tried introducing illustration into the mix, I began to make videos again, and I promised myself daily I would sit down and make more papercuts….soon.

It began to feel like being in a relationship that existed only for show…except there was no other party involved. It was just me verses me and we were stuck in a painful stand off.

Learning to make ‘lace’ with ideas and materials

Then I began to think about the image of the lace maker again.

A quick caveat - I don’t know anything about ACTUAL lace making, and if you do I’m sure this is going to seem really ignorant to you. But please allow me to borrow the metaphorical image of your art form for a few minutes, because it helped me so much and it might help other people…

I imagined that all these things I had done over the years were like individual bobbins, connected by threads that met in the center. Sometimes one handful of bobbins would be where the main action was, sometimes others. But through these crossings and twisting of threads, gathering of bobbins, weaving of ideas, the lace that emerged in the centre was my creative identity forming a unique design that only I knew the pattern description for.

It was liberating to find an image to hold on to, that shifted my mindset from something to be deeply shamed about into something to celebrate.

And I began to find other people who had written about these things too…Emilie Wapnick’s amazing ‘multipotentialite’ TED talk, Barbara Sher’s ‘scanner’ community, Margeret Lobenstine’s ‘renaissance souls’.

I learned that having multiple interests, being super adaptable and a fast learner were actually really useful personality traits as a creative business owner. Slowly I began to see more voices echoing this, often in the form of female coaches who were also escaping what I now call the ‘mastery mentality’.

It started thinking about ways that I could create projects that enabled me to explore new mediums or ideas, while bringing together a more coherent portfolio so I could get funding or commissions.

I learned how to communicate the diversity of my working process both in words and visuals, so it could be better understood by people who didn’t have an ‘ever-searching magpie’ creative approach.

I stopped calling myself flaky.

Instead I learned about about myself, and tried to understand how I worked.

What motivated me?

What bored me to tears?

What stories made me think my approach to my creativity was shameful?

Whose voices gave me permission to follow my own path?

Who was there breaking all the rules and making it work anyway?

Perhaps this need to constantly learn, to feed my curiosity, to discover what’s possible and share it with the world is connected to my HSP nervous system. Being the daily witness to the workings of my brain it feels like it could also be an aspect of having ADHD, which is something I am on the journey to understanding.

No matter what the outcome of that assessment, I see my multi-passionate approach to creativity as both a strength and a non-negotiable these days.

No more pretending to choose.

I know now what my multi-passionate approach can create.

I have developed ways to communicate it with the world.

I trust the process.

I embrace it.

Finding your own multi-passionate metaphor

While the lace making or suitcase metaphors might not be right for you, I hope they might inspire you to find an image that is. One that helps you better understand and embrace your own creative process.

For some, mastery is the key to creative fulfilment. For others it’s diversity and constant creative shape-shifting. And of course there are many, many other ways of being a creative too.

I can see now that often the shame of ‘not choosing’ is holding back fantastic fusions of creative mediums, or the generation of exciting, unique approaches.

There really is no wrong way, only wrong ideas about how creativity should operate.

What matters is that you can find what works for you, so you can bring your own unique form of creative magic into the world.

Accepting this part of myself has helped me to reconnect with my creativity, and make things I genuinely love. I value every bobbin for it’s place in my creative design as I explore it over a lifetime.

What might happen for you if you gave yourself permission to do that too?

What patterns of ideas and materials might weave together to form your creativity?