The Reflexivity of Creativity, Archiving the Self Expression
Designed as a printable document for my class design, this handout supplements a PowerPoint assignment for my Sociology of Education course taught by Dr. Chrys Ingraham. I wanted to create a lesson, teaching in a manner that reflected the core of my past teachers'.
If my credentials, sources, and methods were not suitable for my objectives, I anticipated that my personal experiences would help encourage others to similarly reflect on their own lives as I try. Furthermore, I hoped that my design would speak to the individual who found themselves lost in the fields of academia, life, and meaning. I am not fully accustomed to the social normalization of masking or pretending that the influences of personal life within spectrums of education and work are inappropriate, offensive, or irrelevant. Especially, the life challenges which inhibit performance, connection, and meaning in our shared interactions. Because of my debilitating emotionally irregular sensitivity, social phobia, and depression, I chose to write extensively on this topic.
My topic builds on past dialectically and cognitive behavioral therapy I experienced to help identify and utilize critical thinking and sensory skills to improve immediate and pro-longed wellbeing when faced with intrusive thoughts. I trust that my writings will be the most ideal format for the nature of its topic and for readers who may find themselves in similar predicaments or wish to expand their idea of self beyond conventional means.
Contents
Focus
Metaphor
Who Are You?
What Is Creativity?
Why Is Creative Expression Important?
Make Secret Stuff
To Be Continued
Citations
Focus
"If I cannot understand myself, how can I understand others? How could another possibly understand me?"
Jacquelyn Rose Apostolo
Metaphor
One day, Cassidy and I were playing in front of a mirror in the living room of my parents' home. I led Cassidy close to the mirror, so that she would be able to clearly see both herself and I in our reflections. She initially was not interested. But when I began to point her attention towards the mirror, she quickly identified, what appeared to her, the sudden presence of another dog. Being young and the sole dog in our home, she immediately became aggressive, alert, however, not confused. When I began to pet Cassidy, she became wildly jealous. She sincerely believed that I was, in fact, petting another dog despite my hand stroking her head. As this interaction slowly continued, she began to realize what was happening. Not only of us and our engagement, but herself as well. For the first time, she learned to connect her sensory experiences and observations through self-awareness and otherness in a way she was not able to prior to this event.
Now, she watches me in the kitchen as I prepare my lunches through the black reflection of our living room television while seated on a cozy armchair. She is not permitted in the kitchen, often corrected from "grubbing" at the shorelines of our kitchen. It is located between the hallway and the symbolic "doorway", frame, or border of the kitchen. Previously and occasionally, she will sit like a statue in this location. Sometimes she will drop her red rubber bone on the tiles, purposefully creating a loud noise so that the human subject in the kitchen may direct their attention towards her presence. Here in this situation, are several desires she wishes to resolve through negotiation and strategic planning. Firstly, she wants to have some of the delicious grub. Secondly, she wants to configure a new innovative method to resolve and achieve this goal without being scolded, because the object of her goal is in an area she is not permitted to explore and access. And perhaps thirdly, she wants to achieve this goal efficiently (without scolding) as to increase the likelihood of success. As a result, she studies me in our shared reflection in the armchair as she comfortably awaits, at a distance of course, for a more opportune moment to increase the chances that I will share some of my delicious food.
Cleverly, she is not really grubbing. She is nowhere near the shoreline of the kitchen. She cannot be ignored if she were to drop her red rubber bone, because she is not there. However, the moment I made eye contact with her in our shared reflection and acknowledged this by verbally expressing my initial shock, she immediately left her post, grabbed her rubber bone, and happily sat at the shorelines of the kitchen and dropped it proudly and loudly. Consequently, she both validated and conveyed this new way of efficiently grubbing through this alternative way in which we experience the recognitions of ourselves and one another.
Who do you believe yourself to be?
Why do you believe yourself to be, that which you describe?
How did you come to define yourself "to be this"?
Who Are You?
Over the course of our lives, our reflections in mirrors have steadfastly evolved in increments. Despite our attempts to change ourselves, we both subconsciously and consciously confront the incontrovertible truth that we are aging, dying, and mortal. We are old enough to die as soon as we are born. This dogma is the most familiar epistemology, phenomenology, and method we embody and practice through self-reflexivity. The question, rather, should be "Why are you?".
Reflexivity, according to Bodgan Popveniuc's published scholarly article titled Self Reflexivity. The Ultimate End of Knowledge, is "a superior form of self-activity in which the self-consciousness is produced, and it is sustained any form of self-consciousness.". The piece in essence, explores our consciousness as a product, undergoing a constant process or activity of reflexivity. Self-consciousness, is the result of a thought, thinking of itself thinking. Through the perspective of authorship, the writer is both separate from their writings and one with their writings.
It echoes the Hegelian philosophy combating the atomistic worldview. The individual human subject evolves through dialectical movements within self-development as both, a personal, and collective ontology of historical progress alongside other subjects. In other words, we synthetize what we know (thesis), what we confront (antithesis), and actively seek compromise between the two (synthesis). It is the engaging cycle of knowledge by way of negation and resolution us conscious beings enact with one another.
What is Creativity?
In this respect, I define creativity as an expression of self-activity. Its byproducts suggest interchangeable methods of innovation, self-awareness, and curiosity. It is always learning and ever trying. Therefore, everyone possesses creativity through critical thinking, can improve, and foster its forms of expressionisms. Its uniqueness is interdependent upon the degree, by which, the creator understands the predisposed constraints and predicates of what, how, where, when, and why expectations related to performances within the context of their respective society occur. As James Baldwin once said, "The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers.". Creativity then, is the ability to transcend beyond the created idea of itself by itself.
Why is Creativity Important?
We have all experienced some kind of "writer's block". You know the feeling, am I right? You sit at a blank page with some sort of deadline maybe, an idea of what is expected from you, perhaps even an impending grade to determine how "well" you have completed your task at the forefront of it all. Imaginably, it could be overwhelming if you allow yourself to care about it enough on a deeper and emotionally taxing level. On the other hand, maybe you couldn't even care less for it. In both scenarios, you may procrastinate instead to do what you really want to do with your time or leave things to the last minute because you were trying to cope with the snowballing anxiety crushing your every thought.
Here, we have a identified a conflict of interests we may all find much too familiar to us. At its core, I believe we all share a desire for self-liberation when confronted with any kind of requirement. No matter how loosely structured the demand may be, whether it may be in our best interest to complete it, or may be even something we actually find interesting and to be genuinely enthusiastic about, there is just something about it we find opposing. It is the difference between who will read this piece's every line, who will skim it, who won't even bother, who agrees, who disagrees, who is bored, and the degree of understanding for each kind reader.
Creativity in this example, can be measured in your capacity to understand the type or kind of reader or writer you are. Not as one specific kind, but of which you might recognize yourself to be predominantly, which kinds remind you of others, and how you, yourself, would alter this list. That! "This is how I would do it", is why creativity is so important. It's not really about how much you invest yourself into something, although it helps some creators significantly (and in doing so, acknowledges other conscious beings), it's your ability to recognize your desire for self-liberation as a thesis, your opposition as an antithesis, and your self-reflection of it all as your attempt to progressively synthesize the two together.
Make Secret Stuff
Just do it.
Make "bad" stuff. Make "good" stuff. Make "sad" stuff. Make "happy" stuff. Make "scary" "creepy" stuff. Make "stuff" that's "hard" or "confusing" to look at. Just make anything that makes yourself feel something, anything.
Make stuff for your eyes only.
If you need a reason to or want to know why, it's because I find it to be the only way to escape and overcome the staggering pressures of life in general. I discovered through Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way, a "how to" for "higher creativity", that making secret stuff releases my inner conflicts that permeate my everyday thoughts, habits, and feelings. I will admit, I haven't read through the book in its entirety. However, there is a section I read that explores the practice of "Morning Pages". Essentially, as soon as you wake up, you write three complete pages. It could be about anything, it could be chicken scratch, but it must be something, and it must be three complete pages. Additionally, it must be done everyday and a secret from anyone and everyone.
I do not do this, but I have done this practice during extremely rough points in my life. There is just something about it, writing frantically half-awake, not caring about what words are being put down so long as it fills the pages. After a couple of days, I looked forward to it. After several more, I was over it and just wanted to sleep. Reading back on those notes, I began to correlate the subconscious thoughts and feelings shackling my conscious ones. As a result, I began to see how they were restraining or directing what I was doing in my every day. It was remarkable.
Instead, I write little notes on my cellphone, free write some thoughts on a jotted piece of scrap paper or take a paintbrush to a canvas whenever I start to feel both the gravity of an underlying confliction and the motivation to confront it. There is some stuff I make that I have never shown anyone. They are made purposefully to be a secret. When I make them, they feel like a customized security blanket without anyone's judgement. I start to recognize its shape, why it is shaped in the manner that it is, and I watch it change without my conscious effort but by my hand. Afterwards, I feel more prepared to express my thoughts and engage with others in shared discussions because I made the efforts to better understand myself. I'm not perfect to myself, I still don't understand myself and others fully. Sometimes it improves, sometimes it gets worse. But every time there is another time, there's also another opportunity to try again differently. If you don't give yourself the chance to open up to yourself, how can you do so with others? If you can't do that for yourself, how can you expect others to do the same for you? If others do not know themselves, how can we ever know one another?
And if no one ever in your life ever understands you,
if no one ever recognizes you,
your worth,
the wonderful and glimmering
uniqueness of your life,
shining if only for a moment
in this big wide world
and with everything we believe it to be,
if no one ever sees that in you,
at least you can see yourself looking back upon you.
At least,
you know you.
Even,
if no one else ever does.
To Be Continued
When I look back at my secret stuff
they have become historical archives of my attempts
to express myself
to myself
through what we call reflexivity.
I may not know myself,
but I know that I do not know myself,
and that I am making the effort to do so.
If you were to do the same,
how much better can we understand each other,
the world we share,
and the life we live together?
If only the world did the same and honored the preciousness of one another.
Citations
Cameron, Julia. The Artist's Way. a Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Tarcher Perigee, 2016.
Friedrich, Hegel Georg Wilhelm, et al. The Hegel Reader. Blackwell Publishing, 1998.
Popoveniuc, Bogdan. "Self Reflexivity. The Ultimate End of Knowledge." Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, Elsevier, 26 Dec. 2014. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187704281406409X#:~:text=In%20the%20Social%20and%20Psychological,the%20scientific%20objectivity%20in%20the.
"A Quote by James Baldwin." Goodreads, Goodreads, www.goodreads.com/quotes/337253-the-purpose-of-art-is-to-lay-bare-the-questions.