I like to say I’m a creative person.
I like to make things. Bake things. Write things. Read. Listen and sing. I like the feeling of turning nothing into something. A blank page into a story. A messy kitchen into brownies or cookies of some sort. A quiet room into a concert that definitely no one asked for. Creativity used to feel natural to me, just like breathing.
But since school started, my creative desires have slowly, quietly died off.
And the worst part? No one talks about it.
College loves productivity. It loves deadlines, discussion boards, rubrics, citation formats, group projects, early mornings, and late nights. It loves measurable outcomes.
Creativity, on the other hand, doesn’t always fit neatly into a grading scale or a little check box. There’s no rubric for “I felt inspired today.” There’s no participation grade for staring at the ceiling or into space and imagining a story.
Somewhere between assignments and obligations, my creative brain went into survival mode. Instead of writing for fun, I write because it’s due at 11:59 p.m.
It’s not that I don’t want to create. It’s that my brain feels full. Full of expectations. Full of readings that I find pointless. Full of “you should be working right now.” Even when I technically have free time, I feel guilty using it for something that doesn’t “count.”
And that’s what scares me the most, when creativity starts to feel unproductive.
My creativity died off so quietly that I didn’t realize it until the topic was brought up in my English Creative Writing course. This also made me realize it wasn’t just me. Everything we have to write for our classes is eating away at our creativity, which is making it harder for us to write or express in other creative ways.
College unintentionally trains us to monetize our talents. If you’re good at writing, you should publish. If you’re good at art, you should sell prints. If you’re good at baking, start a business. Suddenly, hobbies aren’t hobbies anymore. They’re potential side hustles. Résumé builders. LinkedIn bullet points.
But what if I just want to create badly?
What if I want to write something no one reads?
What if I want to bake cookies that look uneven and never make it to an Instagram story or Pinterest?
I miss the version of myself who made things simply because she could.
The truth is, creativity requires space, and college rarely gives us that. It requires boredom, wandering thoughts, and slow afternoons. It requires time that isn’t scheduled in a planner. And most of us are operating in constant output mode. Produce. Perform. Submit. Repeat.
I’ve started to realize that my creativity isn’t gone. It’s just buried under way too much pressure (honestly, a decent amount of that pressure I put on myself).
It shows up in small ways. The way I rearrange my room when I’m overwhelmed. The playlists I curate. It’s quieter now, but it’s still there, hidden under a lot of sh*t.
Maybe college isn’t oppressing my creativity on purpose. Maybe it’s just testing whether I’ll protect it.
So here’s what I’m trying to remember: creativity doesn’t have to be impressive to be valid. It doesn’t have to be productive. It doesn’t have to earn me anything.
It just has to exist.
For me, myself, and I.