I want to do art.

All the time.

Those who aren’t part of the crafty-creative crowd probably hear that and think that’s great. It is not great. Well, it is, but it backfires in that I have SO MANY creative things I want to do that I often end up sort of short-circuiting and not doing anything. It’s the most frustrating part of being a creative person or at least a person with a creative-drive in the way that dachshunds have a prey-drive or border collies are driven to herd sheep.

My brain alternates between thinking of creative stuff, being anxious, and being burnt out, and there’s a lot of overlap between all three of those things on any given day. Most nights I go off to sleep thinking of book stuff or thinking about the creative projects I have started that I haven’t finished or things I want to try. As a tween and teen, I would literally go to sleep by thinking about my characters or the world I was creating in my stories, replaying scenes in my head until I drifted off. As an adult, I tend to fall asleep in bed on my laptop or holding my Kindle or fantasize about craft kits I have waiting to be completed (with an edge of guilt).

The problem with having a creative-drive is that isn’t the same thing as a drive to finish said creative projects. I just want to dabble in everything. I have a running list in my head of random artsy things I want to do that I’ve never tried: rug-making, more advanced ceramics and glaze techniques, embroidery, bookbinding, pixel art, making a game, etc. This doesn’t include all the art made by other people that I want to sample like video games, books, movies, and museums. Right now, my dining room table is littered with the detritous of a project I haven’t completed. I started working on a Valentine’s Day themed plastic canvas village right before Finn died, and for months, I couldn’t bring myself to work on it again (his unofficial birthday was Valentine’s Day and he died not long after, which double hurt). Even if the kit didn’t feel mildly blighted, there was a good chance it would have sat on the table half-completed for months while I gallivanted off to work more fully on a writing project or some other all-consuming craft.

Being creativity-driven means going where your brain blows. The process is really what pulls you. A border collie doesn’t necessarily care that the sheep end up in a certain place. It’s getting them all there that does it for their brains. Creativity is like that. I want to move the crochet hook over and over and over to build something. I want to add words to build up an image. I want to add more lines until a picture emerges. The process is what gets the good brain juices flowing. It isn’t until other people step in expecting you to finish something that the product becomes a source of stress or a slightly bigger source of dopamine.

I think a lot of us avoid finishing things for the crash that comes after finishing a project. A large part of it is that there’s the question of what comes next. You know you might aimlessly wander between projects for weeks until something clicks and the good brain state starts flowing again. The itch can be unbearable, or if the project was hard, you know you might be fried and unable to do those fun projects until your brain scabs over and heals and not picking that itchy scab is difficult. The other part is that if you release your projects to the public, then you have to face the stress of other people perceiving your work and you and having opinions about both of those things.

The problem isn’t that creatives shouldn’t monetize their work. It’s that creatives shouldn’t have to monetize everything they do or worry they are wasting time because dabbling in “unproductive” things is part of a creative-driven person’s brain and process. Turning everything into a finished product that must be put out to consumers in some way, shape, or form is demoralizing and impossible. Not everything is worthy of being finished, and not everything is meant to be consumable. Sometimes, it’s just for fun or to pass the time, the artistic equivalent of doing a puzzle. The best way to keep your favorite creative from completely frying their brains is to have basic universal income, so they could monetize certain projects and still dabble when the mood strikes.

Learning is also part of being creative-driven. Most of us want to be jacks of all trades, but society sort of beats it out of us that we don’t have time for things that aren’t making money now or aren’t seen as productive now. College, for many of us, was a liberating experience because it gave us permission to make space for those creative projects or new skills that we might have otherwise skipped for something more “productive.” Being creative-driven is being driven to do and make, yet it’s often seen as lazy or not real work or a waste of time. On a logical level, looking at these people and the bigger picture, I get why they think that way, but I also think a part of it is not understanding that for creative-driven people our minds are never quiet. We’re constantly turning ideas over even when our hands are empty and still, and I think that scares people who have to sit with the silence and blankness rattling around in their heads and wonder what could be in its place.