NOTES ON CREATIVE IDENTITY
There is a particular kind of confusion that can arrive after years of becoming good at something.
You have experience. You know what you are doing. Other people know what you are good at too. Work comes toward you because of it. There is a history behind the role you occupy, and often a perfectly sensible argument for continuing in exactly the same direction.
And yet something else keeps catching your attention.
Not dramatically. Usually quite quietly.
A subject you keep reading about. A material you keep wanting to touch. A kind of work you find yourself looking at longer than you expected. A conversation you keep replaying. A person whose life or work produces a flicker of envy you do not fully understand. An idea you dismiss because it seems impractical, only to find yourself thinking about it again three weeks later.
Sometimes the difficulty is not that we have no direction. It is that the direction we already know how to follow is much louder than the one that is beginning to emerge.
Experience carries weight. It tells you what you can do, what you can be paid for, what other people already recognise in you. It can become the obvious answer to the question of what comes next, and often it is a very good one.
But your expertise can tell you where you have been without necessarily telling you where you are going. What you are good at and what you are drawn toward are not necessarily the same thing.
I think this becomes especially confusing because expectation often arrives wearing the clothes of common sense. You should keep doing this because you are good at it. You should stay in the field where you have credibility.
None of that is unreasonable. Some of it may be absolutely right.
But a should can be loud.
A pull can be quiet.
And repetition is sometimes how we begin to tell the difference. The thing that matters is often not what catches your attention once, we are interested in all sorts of things for an afternoon. The more useful information may be what keeps returning after you have dismissed it.
The same subject. The same kind of work. The same idea. The same desire for a different pace, a different environment, a different way of spending your day.
You do not have to turn that repetition into a decision. You do not have to leave your job, announce a new identity, retrain, monetise the interest, or explain it to anybody.
You can simply notice it.
We are very good at overriding recurring information when it does not fit the story we already have about ourselves. We tell ourselves it is unrealistic, indulgent, distracting, badly timed, outside our field. Sometimes those judgements are useful. Sometimes they are simply the voice of an established identity protecting its territory.
The experienced part of you has earned its place. But the quieter pull may know something too.
Maybe you keep photographing the same kinds of places. Maybe you keep wanting to work with your hands after years spent behind a screen. Maybe the part of your job you once loved now feels strangely flat, while some smaller, less established part of your life has begun to feel more alive.
None of this is an instruction. It is information. Not every recurring interest needs to become a career. Some responsibilities are deeply chosen and genuinely ours.
The work is not to decide too quickly. The work is to notice what keeps happening.
"ATTENTION MOVES FIRST. THE EXPLANATION COMES LATER."
I have seen this happen often enough to take it seriously. Someone says they do not know what they want, and then over the course of a conversation they mention the same thing three times. A piece of work they cannot stop thinking about. Something they keep putting off but never quite let go of.
Perhaps finding our way does not always begin with a plan. Sometimes it begins with a smaller question.
What keeps tugging at my attention?
Not an answer. But something you quietly carry, without really noticing.
A small invitation
Over the next few days, keep a running list of whatever keeps returning to your attention, a subject, a material, a person, a place, a kind of work. Add to it whenever something comes back a second or third time. Don't sort it, explain it, or act on it. At the end of the week, just read the list back.
Notes on Creative Identity is a weekly reflection on creative work, creative practice and what it takes to remain connected to the person inside the work.
Parish Stapleton
Creativity Coach, artist and writer