What is your Creative Outlet?
This is definitely a hard question for me to unpack, which is exactly why I chose it.
I’ve always had an inherent need to outwardly express myself whether it may have been through my personality, speech, spontaneity, writing, art, outfits, anything creative & unconventional.
Most children start off as very creative beings but mostly, as they journey through life they repress and thus lose this part of themselves. Rarely some don’t, and hopefully many re-discover it. The other day I watched a video of 5 year-old me cutting up green stuff and putting it on a piece of paper to create trees & it hit me that I, like many kids have had a creative side to me from a very young age. I remember growing up and collecting leaves, hoarding glitter & drawing excessively even though I was never really good at it. I have memories of creating “art galleries” in my room and allocating hours a week for strict painting. I had diaries, English was always better than Maths, I used my Eid money to buy art supplies & Mister Maker was my best friend.
But as it so often happens, as I grew older, life got busy, my new outlet was socialising, my priorities changed and I stopped painting and writing in journals. My ways of creative expression exponentially declined and thus my growth became limited.
It was only in year 10 when things changed forever. Allah planted the greatest seed in my mind; the idea to do a “365 challenge” where I post a mandatory caption + photo a day. Since then, I miraculously haven’t stopped writing every single day (minus a low point in the middle of year 12 for a few months). This year I chose the theme of daily letters (writing this is 2 birds with 1 stone) and although most days writing has become second nature, some days I have to force myself to go out of my comfort zone and be challenged.
Writing has become my oxygen, the translation of the chaos of my mind to a blank canvas, my empowerment. It has allowed me to regulate my emotions, address what I shut out, articulate, clarify and refine my thoughts. It has improved my mental health, my way of communication, processing, been a source of inspiration to do great things and this list could literally go on forever because writing has had so many incredible benefits. Every word I write has a backstory and a healing. Some call it unchecked and some call it an explosion of passion — I call in art. Every human needs an outlet, so what’s yours?
As my writing opened up, so did my other avenues of expression. I know this part of my room that this photo features looks like it’s a snippet from 2012, but its formation was a like the spreading of an uncontrollable virus. My room and my writing are the physical embodiments of my personality and what lies within. Every corner has a story and every word that I write is a result of an experience.
I never realised that writing often has permanently changed my very place in the world. I didn’t realise just how much of my very identity has been determined by my creative outlets and I’m very grateful I chose this as my question instead of the mundane “what does covid mean to you” lol.
Moral of the story: Don’t forget who you are.
