Creativity is largely intuition - out of my control, fleeting, completely impossible to collect, trap, save. In my opinion, its not something that can be harnessed. Its something built into the body like the instinct to breath. I think of how newborn babies know to hold their breath under water before they’ve even learned to swim and that is how I feel about creativity.

I once learned that the word genius, in ancient cultures, used to mean an external spiritual force that gifted a person their ideas and personal characteristics. An invisible guide that helped a person shape into who they were meant to become on this earth. More literally, it also meant “to beget”, “to give birth”, “to produce” - to create. With time, “genius” started to shift meaning and people understood it as something internal like a summoned force within that gave a person their talents and their strengths. Modernly, we believe it is the person. Genius is a person. A person that is extraordinarily talented and excels in intellect or creativity far beyond their peers.

I believe in the ancient definition. I think we are all guided by a genius force. Maybe thats what I mean by saying “creativity is intuition” and its “uncontrollable”.

Sometimes, I wonder if the only difference between those able to succeed through creativity or intellect and those who don’t, is because some people are more in tune with their intuition and, in turn, their “genius”. To tattle on myself, theres a piece of me that really does believe everyone is creative and everyone is brilliant until they either no longer want it or no longer trust it.

So, can taste be developed on purpose? I don’t think so. I think we absorb subconsciously every single thing we come into contact with. It makes me think of literal taste - did you decide what foods you like and which you hated? Thats how I feel about color, or music, or fashion. I think aesthetics numb what taste actually is and genres try to encompass and confine what inevitably has to be challenged to create more. If I believe creativity is like ancient “genius”, then is it scary to consider that these terms might just create a false sense of control over our ideas and creativity? Yeah.

In a weird way, it also comforts me.

I’m someone with diagnosed OCD - the Just Right, Perfectionistic, Moral Dilemma, Mental Loop type of way. But the through line of OCD (or at least my non-medically trained, personal, understanding of it) is really just the paralysis that not-knowing can create, and the lengths one can go to try and find certainty when there is never going to be a certain answer found. In response, a lot of therapy tries to have you sit with the possibility of not knowing or the possibility of the worst outcome being what actually happens. You sit in that discomfort and its visceral and its haunting and its miserable until one day its not. But then one day something else is.

You would think having uncertainty, or believing I have no control over my creativity - something that not only creates my entire identity but also how I support myself financially - would be earth shattering to a brain like mine.

You would think the very idea could make a nihilist out of me. Sometimes it has.

But the opposing optimist in me makes me also believe that everything is possible (in a good way). It makes me believe magic is real and my dreams could be reality even if I don’t know how I will get there.

It makes me feel like the uncertainty is on purpose, not knowing is by design.

It makes me feel the presence of the ancient use of “genius”. Something is guiding ideas and inspiration and intellect regardless on if I caused it.

Creativity, like genius and newborn babies underwater, is instinctual and when I don’t know what to do next, something will make me hold my breath until I learn to swim.

On one hand, I was kind of living for the concept of a Ghost Post - it made me remember when posting had nothing to do with my job(s). But, admittedly, on the other, I was secretly worried. Maybe that “worry” was the part of my brain that craves a “measure” of a good days work, the same part of my brain that itches for external validation no matter how much the rest of my brain denies that desire exists. Because deep down I wished so much that I could participate in a Ghost Post without at least feeling like I might be sacrificing my job.

This leads me to my secret love of the Flop Post.

A flop post makes me feel like theres a little left for me at the end of the day. I get to remember that not everyone has to like or understand what I do and maybe I don’t need to always over communicate myself in order to express myself.

Girl, I’m aware - this is all contradictory to the aforementioned piece of me that feels security in analytics that promise, what we (falsely) equate to, a sense of security. But there is a true duality when visibility has the power to bring opportunity, open doors, and create success in equal amounts as it has the ability to limit creativity, force an outcome thats a derivative of whats been a “proven success”, and exclude fresh creativity on the basis of “the algorithm couldn’t clearly define who your target audience was”.

Theres gray area in everything all the time and I hate that, but I also have to accept that. I can want to ghost post…in fact, I can actually ghost post if I feel compelled one of these days. I can also want to see my work, my self, my creativity be positively received in a measurable way without villainizing myself for it. Between those moments, I can definitely relish in the flop posts.

What I probably won’t do, is act like these things mean nothing to me and that I am with the crowd of the high and mighty who refuse to admit they care (even a little bit). It’s part of my job(s) to care, to notice, to understand. Its just about keeping it at bay - allowing yourself to understand how social media shapes the creative world through observing, and then checking in with yourself to know what feels like the next best step regardless.

REGARDLESS

REGARDLESS

REGARDLESS

That’s the key, do it regardless <3.

Recently, I’ve started sharing my creative career online. I genuinely love what I do, “I work in Art Direction”. I paint with a broad stroke here because I feel like my professional portfolio has been very non-traditional and that is the most concise way to communicate my expertise.

I’ve done in-house Art Direction for brands which meant my job was steering every shoot, event, and visual collateral (both external and internal) so it seamlessly fit inside the brand world and execution was to our standard. It means being able to manage a project to completion, ideate concepts, curate creative teams, produce, and post-produce. It also means being able to effectively communicate the vision you have so every single person knows what we are working to create. Know your references. Know the personalities. Know the timeline. Know your boundaries.

I’ve also done Art Direction on film sets which, in my experience, is a bit more self reliant than team-coordination. In this world, my expertise lies in custom props, prop sourcing, set decorating, and set designing. (I was fortunate to have this experience before diving into in-house brand work, and its given me a lot of confidence in my

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Having been out of traditional academia for some time and some change now, and being wrapped up in the whirlwhind grindset of becoming a career woman, I haven’t had the time, or energy, or care to actively submerge myself with literary media with purpose past relaxing in a bubble bath and rejecting screens for half an hour or more substance than scrolling an led screen and skimming the top layer of a quickly written, opinionated, think piece that reiterates the hot takes of this weeks algo-dump.

So here’s my luke warm word vomit for the week:

I sat down with the intention of writing, which normally leads me towards flipping through backlogs of unfinished thoughts or old essays that might spark a new thought, my own archives if you will.

I had a loose, completely unformed, ink-smudge-of-an idea that I couldn’t quite form the correct sentences around but I kept remembering a term I first came across in my Junior year of college - “Collective Memory”.

I vaguely recalled the general essence of the word like loosely drawn schematics comprised of floating hot words like “visual identities” “cultural impact” and “dissemination” but could not, for the life of me, piece them together. (Embarrassing).

So I dug through bullshit documents, client files, and discarded briefs that cluttered my desktop and found the paper I once wrote all about collective memory.

I read 2 of the 10 pages.

She was smarter than me - more precise, well read, perfectly edited. She had a vocabulary I would have to look up.

She understood discourse, in fact lead a discourse, that I was now struggling to maintain focus on.

I had written those reflections, sited each source, and analyzed every example. I remembered writing the paper - and yet I don’t think I could have written it today. At least not with a massive lifestyle change or months and months of research with a singular focus ornamented with the additional research of topics in related subtopics and - oh yeah - a completely reset nervous system and rehabilitated attention span.

I work in visual media and social media is the primary landscape - so it comes with the territory. Things are weighed on a completely different scale than before when measuring somethings cultural impact - does anything stick with a collective? What do people remember? How does what we do remember shape our identities? What happens when visual culture is distorted, mistrusted, fleeting, over-saturated? What happens when the collective is now an echo chamber of things you already like and people you already agree with? What happens when the hub of visual culture is no longer the collective at large, but separated into mini versions of the Truman Show designed for each hand that holds the phone?

What happens when I contribute to that?

I find myself between a gap of being so grateful for an online platform and feeling a growing concern of realizing how much it can change you too. You may create differently because you consume so differently - and finding that balance is normally a hindsight 20/20 moment.

Additional Material:

• Original Essay on Collective Memory

Original reference material on the topic of Collective Memory if you care to read up:

• Blow, Charles. (2022, May 20). The memory of George Floyd is literally fading across America. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/05/20/opinion/blm-george-floyd-mural.html

• Hariman, R., & Lucaites, J. L. (2003). Public identity and collective memory in U.S. iconic photography: The image of “accidental napalm.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 20(1), 35–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/0739318032000067074

My first introduction to Yoko Ono’s life and career was delivered as an oral history of unsourced footnotes. I took them with me as a cautionary tale in the form of cheap, stale, gossip. While very little of Yoko Ono’s life is ordinary, to see a woman be separated from her accomplishments by the shadows of men and the spit of angry perspectives is, unfortunately, a very familiar and feminine experience. Attempting to ease the discomfort this brought me, I would envision Yoko Ono existing somewhere liminal between all of the myths crafted around her, that she could periodically escape to live within a glowing orb protected from scrutinous eyes. This vivid image created from my not knowing where to place my empathy and, admittedly, my pity.

I say all of this not with acceptance, but with acknowledgement. And as I roamed through museum rooms filled with years of her work, her voice, her perspective - I felt amazement with an undertone of grief and a pinch of hope.

What I witnessed was someones pure understanding of their self. Unwavering in her position, her beliefs, her peace. I felt a liminal space becoming actualized - where a woman can advocate her truth and a room filled wall to wall with people who just listened.

Might I have been projecting my own fears revolving femininity and success onto this exhibit? For sure.

In these rooms, I saw a woman scapegoated and hyperbolized into enough manufactured myths to, at one point, overshadow her story. I also saw a woman who remained relentlessly firm in what was true to her.

Links

• tickets

• my trip to the exhibit

The following is an old diary entry that I now look back on fondly. Over a year has past since this was originally written and I find comfort in how unfamiliar the voice has become. I hope sharing this moment of self doubt can ease the mind of similar creatives, future me with an inevitable existential crisis at the dining table, and anyone who feels guilty for not knowing their next step. In the time elapsed since writing this, I feel I’ve found exactly who I am. I am confident you will also feel that way soon.

°❀⋆.࿔*:･

I am an artist, I am a college graduate, I am a girl, I am lucky.

I am racially ambiguous, I am short, I was once told if I was a fruit I’d be a strawberry (which left me in an identity crisis for about 4 hours). Even now, I’m still concerned as to why a group of my peers so strongly agreed on strawberry, but I’ll try to move past it for the sake of getting to the point - which is: despite knowing all of these true things about my person, I have no idea who I am.

That’s exaggerating, which I love to do. I do know who I am - I’m a lucky female educated artist and I’m half Filipino and half Irish and my name is Makayla. I know everything about me.

I am a sister, a daughter, a friend, a girlfriend. I am a former varsity athlete, I curated philanthropic art shows before I was old enough to vote, I made a business that was too big for me to keep up with, and I got my first job 3 days after moving across the country. I now fear settling for the expected Overachiever to Burn Out pipeline.

I’m also tired all the time and paralyzed, equally by the thought of making, and the thought of not making.

Sometimes I am quiet, which is a new reaction for me. I can be eerily calm compared to my otherwise reactive nature (Pisces with an Aries rising might be to blame, but I am definitely not to blame). To me, Quiet is a sign that something is serious, I only handle true emergencies calmly.

So while I sit here, filling a quiet room with the scratches of unspoken thoughts against a notebook I had once forgotten to fill, I find myself with all the situational symptoms that I am once again going through “something serious”.

°❀⋆.࿔*:･