I just received an email asking where Creativity – it’s in our DNA-Part 2 was…and I just found a couple of the paragraphs below written over a year ago in a my blog drafts.  I have no idea where I was going with this entry…but I’ll pick up where I left off.

Last week (which is now a year ago…lol) I told you about my creative youth but in my later teens and early twenties my creativity dried up.  I imagine part of my distraction from arty endeavors was my interest in my first love.  It wasn’t a healthy, nurturing relationship and I felt like something big was missing in my life.  I broke off the relationship and wanted to grow creatively.  With the hope of a career in the arts, I enrolled in a junior collage. In my first art class the teacher told the class we were going to draw an egg.  I raised my hand and said, “what if we are not motivated to draw an egg?”  I was informed if I wanted to stay in that class I would draw an egg.  My degree track changed to sociology.

My interest in the arts and creativity was reignited when I purchased a SLR Nikon camera.  Photography trained me to slow down and look at the world in a different way.  It got me out of my thoughts.

A friend knew of my desire to paint and bought me 12 tubes of Liquitex acrylics and several notebooks filled with canvas paper.  The desire to paint swirled in my belly but I was frozen by perfectionism.  I didn’t want to waste the paint or ruin the paper…so I did nothing.  And I didn’t do much creatively for a long time. Actually the things that I was doing upon reflection was obsessing about the size of my thighs, obsessing about dieting, soul searching about what I wanted to do with my life and questioning my life’s purpose.  I was lonely and struggling to shed the perception of who I was in my youth.

And what was happening in this period of my life was quite simply I was creating myself.  So often we take on the persona of our parents desires of who they want us to be, we take on the dogma of the religion in which we were raised and we form the “self” we think we should be.

I kept taking photographs.  I changed the spelling of my name to e’Layne and actually at one point I was giving a spiritual name, Sakena, by my Sufi teacher at the time, Pir Vilayat.  I went by the name Sakena for a couple of years.  In a state of moderate terror and with very little money in my pocket (probably about $200) I moved from Florida to the Bay Area.  I jumped and was clueless if a net would appear.  I will end here for now…age 25, untethered from my past, in a strange town knowing not a soul. I was a young woman with fear in my belly and a knowing in my bones that life was way more than what I thought I was.  And it was shortly after this moved that I stated my business Co-Creations…creating art and more importantly creating myself.

…and just maybe in less than a year I’ll write Part 3…or maybe I should write the story of my life in my spare time…lol…big love to anyone reading this.  Do not go quietly when your soul wants a voice.

Gain Distance from Negative Thoughts by Author e’Layne Kelley (elaynekelley.com)

 

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