Being expected to be creative is a burden.

Growing up, I was the type of child who sang in the front of the room during family parties, loving that every eye was on me. Like most kids, my favorite elementary school activities involved a plethora of crayons and colorful construction paper. Free time was occupied by crafts and creating creatures I wouldn’t even think to imagine these days.

Moving forward, middle school was where I began to find my footing in poetry and creative writing. I remember the journey I went through to accurately get my feelings on paper during an extremely difficult time in my life. I was even awarded a few times based on how descriptive and heartfelt the work was.

In high school, I joined my school’s a cappella women’s choir, as well as the chamber show choir. These were both pretty accomplished and well-known groups in my town. We travelled the country to compete in choir competitions and honestly, we ended up winning most of them.

However, because of all of my accomplishments and talents proven growing up, there’s constantly been an expectation from my peers, teachers and community to be a lot more creative than I actually was.

In all honestly, my success in choirs stemmed not from the fact that I could come up with creative concepts and visual representation, but from the fact that I could follow and abide by rules and instruction. If I am being directed, I can carry out tasks, but not think of the idea itself.

Though I'm aware of my strengths and weaknesses (strengths being following direction, taking a leadership role and working well under pressure, and weaknesses being thinking of a creative concept and portraying visual representations), I’ve continued to insist on trying to strengthen my creative skills, always seeming to come up short of my expectations.

Lately, I’ve been in an even deeper creative rut, causing me to struggle in my studio art course, as well as my job here at Odyssey. The reason I’ve fallen deeper into this hole is because I want to write about things that matter to me and relate to others.

However, I’m not satisfied with writing articles about how awesome my roommate is, or what my summer bucket list looks like. The question then is, what am I satisfied with?

The key here is to balance being personal without making this a diary entry every week.

From now on, I refuse to write the basic articles about how much I love my dog or how hard school is. From now on, I will actively work to exercise my creativity through writing and making sure I have future content that matters.