Dina Climatiano

Creativity Challenge, Day 31:

Look at that. We made it!

I seem to be developing a crescendoing cough so we’ll have to count these delirious ramblings as today’s creative offering. Shut up, it’s my completely made up challenge, I can do whatever I want 😉

This past month was… Interesting.

In hindsight, I kind of treated this creativity challenge like I treated exercise when I first started working out and going to the gym consistently.

I knew being creative was something I wanted to do, but it wasn’t always something I felt like doing in the moment. So I created a framework that made it impossible for me not to shop up. In the case of the gym, it was signing up for personal training sessions that I could not skip. In this case it was my commitment to delivering a presentation at Translate Cluj in two months. I have to show something. Can’t let those people down… They’re practically family ❤

So how do I sum up this challenge?

First of all, this was hard. I don’t think anyone reading my posts about this challenge missed my struggle to produce something on most days. But much like going to the gym, or even just taking a brisk walk, I never ever regretted the time I invested, even when the results were… Underwhelming.

A lot of the times they were underwhelming. The bare minimum. Even less than the bare minimum on some days (I mean… I managed to count tidying up as a creative endeavor. This was Day 3, mind you, so we can hardly blame fatigue). I may not have been enthusiastic about every single one of my creative endeavors, but I went ahead and did them anyway. And I have to admit… Producing something every single day, no matter how small or half assed, gave me a sense of accomplishment. It’s true what they say: anything worth doing is worth doing half assed.

I proved to myself that I can, in fact, stick to a daily practice.

I rediscovered drawing and painting. Definitely going to take a deep dive into that and see where it takes me. I like how it makes me look at things neutrally and really focus on what I’m doing in the moment, so let this be my form of meditation for a while.

I challenged some limiting beliefs (e.g. I can’t sew to save my life) and reframed them as invitations to improve (I can’t sew well now, but I can learn and become better).

I picked up some new skills, some of which I’ve never even heard of before (felting, anyone?).

In doing so, I’ve created a workflow for myself through which I approach picking up new skills, so they’re not so scary and deflating.

I got around to doing things I’ve been planning to do for ages, but just never seemed to allow myself to not get them perfect. A recurring theme of the past month was “something is always better than nothing and done is better than perfect”. I used to think it’s because perfect doesn’t exist, now I think it’s because perfect doesn’t really matter most of the time for most things.

In the same vein, I practiced recognizing my self-criticism and then not allowing it to be the reason why I don’t do something. I got silly. I got vulnerable. I got super specific, or I kept things very general or surface level. And all of these made me better.

In the end, the daily practice aspect of this challenge paid off. It made me follow through even when I was facing challenges and biting off more than I could chew. Instead of giving up completely or procrastinating to “whenever”, I readjusted my goals to fit the constraints of the day. This, in turn, made me work on my patience (though I admit I’m still sorely lacking in that department), but also develop an appetite for creativity and artistic expression.

Moving forward I’d like to complete some projects I started (looking at you, red coat pocket) and maybe plan some new ones. Further down the line I would also like to explore some more mediums that I did not get around to over the last 31 days and expand my skillset even more. I don’t think I will do this daily, though, and I definitely won’t attempt to post daily anymore. This is exhausting, not going to lie. But like… Weekly? Or monthly? I can probably swing that.

But my next “big” creative endeavor will be to sift through this challenge and extract a decent conference presentation ;P I have a couple of angles I’d like to explore here, let’s see what I make of it.

So if you’ve been following along, what creative offering did you like best? What did you hate, and why? What would you like me to explore next? What are your insights from this process? Did I inspire you at all, or was I just mildly entertaining?
I’m not committing to anything here, but I drew a lot of ideas from the initial survey and I generally like interacting with people, so your feedback will be appreciated. Have at it, I will not be offended.

Here’s a cat.