I've been thinking a lot recently about creativity.

When I was a child, I was regularly praised for being "creative" or "very creative." We did a lot of what was called "creative writing" in school language-arts classes - basically, it was writing stories or poems. I also often went my own way in Art class. And I had my critters - I knew how to sew, even as a pretty young child, and I had sort of a knack for designing and making stuffed toys to fit what I imagined up and decided I wanted. I also spent a lot of time making up stories in my head. Some of them were "backstories" or "life stories" of my critters, some were just stories. I had a pretty rich inner life as a child.

I do not do that so much any more.

I am not sure why. I feel bad when I look around at other knit bloggers, or at Knitty, or at MagKnits. I feel like I could - and possibly should - be doing that. Designing my own stuff all the time. Not following published patterns. Because, you know - I have this background as having been a "creative" child.

I think part of the reason is sheer tiredness. A lot of what creativity I posess is channeled these days towards teaching - new ways to explain things, activities to do with the class, jumping up and down and generally shedding my usual dignity (ladies don't wave their arms around and pretend they are cilia) in the service of trying to get that little spark of interest to show up in the students. Or it's channeled into research, into problem-solving, into standing over a computer wrapped up in the throes of its own error messages and trying to figure out what to do to fix it.

When you only have a couple hours a week to devote to "artistic" pursuits, I think, you're more likely to go "safe" - to do things that have a high probability of succeeding. Because, it's too much of a drag to have spent all of your knitting time for two weeks on a sweater design and find that you need to rip out all that work because you miscalculated and it will be too small, or something.

But I still feel the pressure, the push. I think in some quarters there is a subtle prejudice - that if you're not designing your own, you're no better than those "blind followers" Elizabeth Zimmerman talked about. (And you know, as much as I love some of her writing - I don't know. Sometimes "opinionated and convinced I am right" just rubs me the wrong way a little. I think it's because I deal with so many opinionated-and-convinced-they-are-right people in my everyday life). I've never actually READ someone as writing (in an article or on a blog) that "you might as well not knit if you're not designing" but I'm sure there are people who have that attitude.

And I don't know. I think a lot of my sadness and feelings-of-inadequacy about this is wrapped up in the fact that I try to do EVERYTHING, and I try to do EVERYTHING well, and for me, a "decent" job of something is usually not good enough. I mean, last night, I was telling a colleague about how I felt bad about my "ugly" lawn and how I didn't feel right being able to complain about junked cars and such on other lawns in town (I am on the town Beautification Council) because my own lawn is often not perfectly mown, or it goes a little too long between edgings, or something. And he looked at me and reminded me that there was a huge difference between not having the flowerbeds weeded every week and having three rusted out Chevys on the lawn. And he's right, I know that intellectually, but emotionally, I feel like my house is too glassy for me to be able to throw even stones that may be justified.

And that I'm in a milieu where there are so many brilliant and creative people - well, a lot of days I feel kind of like the dim bulb of the department. And I realize that's probably not true and even if it is it isn't healthy for me to always go around in a fug of self-criticism, but it's an ingrained part of my personality (where it came from, I am not sure) and it's hard for me to get rid of it.

When I was in high school, I remember one of my friends bought a little sign that said, "Damn, I'm good!" and hung it up in her dorm room. And I remember seeing it and being secretly aghast: how could someone claim that about herself? I was only willing to accept that I was "good" when some Objective Third Party told me so. (And that's probably the crux of a lot of my problems right there). But how do you balance? How do you strike the right point on the continuum between "I'm a worm, everything I touch turns to mud" and "I am so great that no one can tell me anything I do is less than perfect, and if they do, they are wrong wrong wrong!"

But creativity. I look at what people are doing, and something in my heart longs - it's almost like you imagine a caged bird would feel when observing his free brethren outside the window. I'd love to go back to creating crazy critters again. Or I'd love to design a sweater, maybe a cabled sweater, maybe a lacy cardigan. I'd love to make something that no one had ever seen before. I'd love to have a pattern published somewhere. But I just can't overcome the inertia of starting, of thinking, "How do I know I have enough yarn when I'm just leaping off a cliff into the unknown?" or "but what if it's really ugly when it's done?" or "what if I submit it somewhere and it gets sent back with a letter that's really very polite and all, but I read between the lines the message of 'your designing sucks. don't bother us again.'?" Because again - there's that safety issue. I put myself "out there" every day of my life with teaching - I have ample opportunities for self-criticism when I look out over the class and see the vacant expressions or hostile looks (I try not to take it personally. I tell myself some of the vacant looks are because they've had three classes before mine and are suffering from low blood sugar. Or that maybe the hostileness is because they had a fight with a friend before they came into class, or their parents are on their case about something, or whatever. But it's still hard for me not to look at myself as the cause of the blank stares or rolled eyes or hostile glances). And submitting journal articles - whether to a "co-author" for critique or to the journal for acceptance or rejection - also carries its own raft of difficult emotions.

I guess the other thing is I find a hard time with the slipperiness of opinion. I think everyone's had the experience of seeing a design, thinking it unappealing, and then finding that lots of other people love it. Or the reverse (which is in some ways worse; it leads me to doubt my own judgement), where you really like something - a design, a yarn, a book, whatever - and then you read the opinion of someone who does nothing but snark on it. (And I always get the feeling in the subtext of some of those reviews: "...and if you disagree with me, you're an idiot.") How can two different people look at the same design and come to such different opinions as "I wouldn't wear it if I were cold and naked and had nothing else to put between me and frostbite" and "This is so great! I want to make this pattern right away!"

I know, it's matters of taste. But maybe I AM "excessively left-brained" in that I want things to be objective. And I especially want things from what I view as "authorities" (e.g., journal reviewers of my articles) to be objective. And so I kind of convince myself that the "authorities" are right and I must be mistaken if we disagree. And maybe that's a part of it - I know, deep down, if I designed some silly little thing and sent it off to Knitty or MagKnits or Knitscene or whereever - and I got back that Very Polite But No Thank You letter, it would destroy any joy I had in designing - and very possibly any joy I had in knitting - because I'd look at it and go, "Okay...an "authority" thinks I have no talent." (This is also why, although I used to write copious amounts of poetry, I've never submitted it to a "real" journal ever.)

And so, I seesaw back and forth - part of me sees the need to teach myself to put on my Big Girl Panties and deal with rejection, because rejection is a part of life, and avoiding rejection really never got me ANYTHING other than living a fairly cloistered life. And yet, on the other hand...when I come home at night and I'm tired and worn and I've given it my all for another day, it's hard to think of ripping open a letter and getting a "no" and having that happen week after week, month after month, and yet keep on with it. (I really respect those who are freelancers of any sort, who submit stories or poems or paintings or patterns or whatever to some Judging Facility and then have to either get back the "no, we don't want this" or the very rare "yes, we will publish this." I don't think I could take that kind of tension.)

And yeah, I do it with the journal articles. But somehow, that's different. I can kind of-sort of divorce who I *am* from that - I can tell myself I'm playing the academic game, that it's something we all have to do, and so I can brace myself for the rejections or the incomprehensible requests to "revise" in some way that I cannot revise because of lacking data or whatever. But to submit a pattern somewhere (or a story, or a poem) - that feels like taking a chunk out of my soul, and putting it in an envelope, and sending it away for strangers to go over with a fine-toothed comb, to look for all the flaws in. And I don't know if I could take that.

So anyway. I'd love to be able to design but I also fear the whole process of getting my work judged (and probably, my inner critic says, found sorely lacking). I enjoy knitting others' designs and yet at the same time, sometimes it feels like there's a little hole there, a little blank space, that isn't quite filled.

So I don't know. If I do ever design anything much, I think I'll offer it as free patterns. I think I feel like, with free-and-amateur patterns, it would be kind of ungracious for someone to be too harsh in their criticism of it, and I could almost justify the ignoring of said criticism.

How do people like Annie Modesitt - who designs some brilliant stuff but also stuff that's unpopular with a lot of knitters - manage to keep going? How does she not let the load of criticism and just plain snark get to her, and make her give up? Because constructive criticism I can (usually) deal with, but when people are critical for the sake of criticising, or the sake of making themselves look big or sophisticated or knowing - that's just another instance of human-on-human friction that's hard for me to take. But to be able to rise above that - to be able to have designs that flopped - and just say "I have a vision" and keep going, that's something.

(I suppose if I knew the answer to that, I'd be a designer. Maybe it's one of the little secret temperamental things that separates the true artist from the pretender.)