I have always been in tune with my creativity. When I was small, I watched my mother make hats, and beaded accessories for years. We didn’t have many toys growing up. My parents didn’t believe dolls were appropriate toys for children (a fruit of the Pentecostal African’s obsession over the spiritual) and so they bought us building blocks to stimulate our creativity. And what the blocks could not conjure for us, we created with our minds. I became very interested in fashion at the age of nine, not because I was particularly fascinated by the idea of fabrics or tailoring, but because when my sister and I made plays, I wanted to ensure that our characters were properly dressed according to their personalities and stories. We would spend hours with books and pens, discussing what our characters wore, and I would draw out the outfits so that we wouldn’t forget. Eventually, we had wardrobes full of clothes we both loved. And that’s when I knew that I had an active imagination; it all felt too real.
But as we grew older and approached our teenage years, we became more acquainted with the concept of embarrassment and stopped making the plays. Instead, I discovered an online community of literate roleplayers I was fascinated by. Literate roleplaying involved building worlds through writing and designing characters to live in them. A roleplayer would create a character and interact with the characters of other roleplayers, thereby forming a relationship. We would take turns writing out full dialogues that happened between the characters. It was like the plays, but cooler because I no longer made just the outfits, but also the type of people that wore them, the kind of stories behind them, the worlds they lived in, and the memories they made. My teenage years were exciting because of this hobby and it was a safe haven for me, living in the house of Nigerian parents who lived in Venezuela and whose paranoia over the unknown restricted my ability to make friends outside. Literate roleplaying also made me a better writer and helped me develop the confidence to take on writing in school and excel at it. I wrote for the school’s E-Journalism team and won the creative writing award at the end of my final year.
But when I entered University, things changed. I had to drop roleplaying because it took so much time and Law was a very demanding course. And eventually, the joy I experienced from writing was slowly replaced by fear. It was difficult to write something and feel good about it because I was building quite a following and I couldn’t shake off the fact that people now had expectations about me and the things I did. My writing, my creativity was no longer for my eyes only, or the pleasure of a literate roleplaying partner living somewhere in New Zealand. It was for my immediate friends, the people I looked up to, the entire world to see. I would spend hours writing things that would never get published, and overanalyze every sentence and metaphor I used. I dreaded the process, so eventually, I quit. Or at least for a while.
But on the first day of 2021, I made a promise to myself to publish one article on medium every month. It was such a hard task for me at this point, because I hated everything I wrote. For someone who was so used to writing multiple drabbles in a day, it was very difficult to reconcile the image of the writer I once was with the now. I constantly compared my work with that of other writers I admired and my inadequacies pushed me further back into my shell. Compliments I received began to feel patronizing, like the people paying them were obliged to say something due to the relationship we had, and they didn’t really mean it. The pleasure I derived from writing had gone. I wrote because I had to, not because I wanted to. And as a writer this was heartbreaking because writing used to be air to me, it used to be something I used as a means of escape. I loved it, and now, it was something I was constantly running away from.
I can’t say there was any particular moment where things clicked. I just know that at some point I grew sick and tired of myself, so I started searching for answers. A mentor I follow on Instagram made a reel about Imposter syndrome and when I watched it, I felt seen. I learned that when people think you’re good at something, there’s a tendency to feel pressured by their perceptions of you. It’s like working for a paycheck, except money isn’t the stimulus, but every clap you get, and WhatsApp story repost, and comment, and wild declaration of delight. You believe that if you cannot do better than what you consider your best, then it is not worth doing at all, and so you slow down the pace. It dawned on me then, that I had forgotten how to enjoy my work and the process of creating because I was no longer doing it for me. The plays I performed as a kid, the bead-making, the literate roleplaying, all those were activities I did for myself because I loved them. Once my primary focus shifted to other people and their reactions to the things I made or created, my ability to express myself as openly and as honestly as I wanted to diminished and so I felt constricted and bored.
There and then, I decided to go against this grain, actively. I wrote every day. I wrote nonsense. The most random shit. Sometimes I would write observations about occurrences in my life without any real idea as to where I was going with them or where they would lead me, and other times I wrote structured pieces, some of which I published. Every artwork didn’t have to be a masterpiece, I realized. Van Gogh made more than 900 paintings in his lifetime, but Starry Night is the one we all know, even without knowing who painted it, because it is on t-shirts and classroom slides, and Tumblr quotes with bad poetry attached to them. Eventually, I didn’t need stimuli, I was writing and creating on impulse. Slowly, I regained control of myself and my ability to do work, and I began to express my creativity again, despite the doubt and fear that would occasionally creep in. I remember a conversation I had with a friend where he told me that Imposter Syndrome was one of the biggest ironies: because if you think what you create is not good enough, and you stop creating as a result, then chances are that you will never improve because mastery is gained from repetition.
There is so much I am yet to learn but this experience taught me a lot about myself, and about my relationship with the things I love to do. I am nowhere close to enjoying the way I expressed myself as a child, and sometimes I fear that unabashed expression and self-love is a concept owned best by children, but I am better at this writing thing now than I was at the beginning of this year, because I am doing it for me, for my own pleasure. So will I ever feel satisfied? There is no telling yet. But I would not get any better if I stop writing, and that’s enough motivation for me.
