I am creative.

I am creative. What I do is alchemy. It’s a mystery. I don’t do it, but I let it be done through me.

I am creative. Not all creative people like this label. Not everyone looks like that. Some creative people see science in what they do. That’s your truth and I respect it. Maybe I even envy them, a little. But my process is different, my being is different.

Apologizing and qualifying beforehand is a distraction. That’s what my brain does to sabotage me. I leave it aside for now. I can come back later to apologize and rate. After having said what I came to say. Which is difficult enough.

Except when it’s easy and flows like a river of wine.

Sometimes does come over there. Sometimes what I need to create comes in an instant. I’ve learned not to say it at the time, because if you admit that sometimes the idea just comes and it’s the best idea and you know it’s the best idea, they think you’re not working hard enough.

Sometimes I work and work and work until the idea arises. Sometimes it comes instantly and I don’t tell anyone for three days. Sometimes I’m so excited by the idea that came instantly that I let it slip away, I can’t help it. Like a kid who found a prize in his Cracker Jacks. Sometimes I get away with it. Sometimes other people agree: yes, that is the best idea. Most of the time this is not the case and I regret giving in to enthusiasm.

It’s best to save your enthusiasm for the meeting where it will make the difference. Not the informal meeting that precedes that meeting with two other meetings. Nobody knows why we have all these meetings. We keep saying we’re going to eliminate them, but then we just find other ways to have them. Sometimes they are even good. But other times they are a distraction from real work. The ratio between when meetings are useful and when they are a regrettable distraction varies depending on what you do and where you do it. And who you are and how you do it. Again I digress. I am creative. That is the theme.

Sometimes many hours of hard, patient work produce something that is barely usable. Sometimes I have to accept that and move on to the next project.

Don’t ask about the process. I am creative.

I am creative. I don’t control my dreams. And I don’t control my best ideas.

I can insist, surround myself with facts or images and sometimes that works. I can go for a walk and sometimes that works. I could be making dinner and there’s a Eureka that has nothing to do with sizzling oil and bubbling pots. I often know what to do the second I wake up. And then, almost as often, when I become conscious and part of the world again, the idea that would have saved me turns to dust that vanishes in a meaningless wind of oblivion. Because I believe that creativity comes from that other world. The one we enter in dreams, and perhaps, before birth and after death. But that’s something poets have to ask themselves, and I’m not a poet. I am creative. And theologians insist that the need to gather armies in their creative world is real. But that’s another digression. And a depressing one. Perhaps on a much more important topic than whether I am creative or not. But it’s still a digression from what I came here to say.

Sometimes the process is evasion. And agony. You know the cliché about the tortured artist? It’s true, even when the artist (and let’s put that noun in quotes) is trying to write a soda jingle, a callback on a boring sitcom, a quote request.

Some people who hate being called creative may be closeted creatives, but that’s between them and their gods. No offense intended. Your truth is also true. But mine is for me.

Creatives recognize creatives.

Creatives recognize creatives like queers recognize queers, like real rappers recognize real rappers, like convicts know convicts. Creatives have enormous respect for creatives. We love, honor, emulate and practically deify the greats. Deifying any human being is, of course, a tragic mistake. We have been warned. We know better. We know that people are just people. They fight, they feel alone, they regret their most important decisions, they are poor and hungry, they can be cruel, they can be as stupid as us, because, like us, they are clay. But. But. But they do something incredible. They give birth to something that did not exist before them and could not exist without them. They are the mothers of ideas. And I guess, since it’s just there, I have to add that they are the mothers of invention. Ba fool! Well, that’s done. Continue.

Creatives belittle our small achievements because we compare them to those of the greats. Beautiful animation! Well, I’m not Miyazaki. That is greatness. That is greatness straight from the mind of God. This half-starved little thing that Yo made? It more or less fell off the back of the turnip truck. And the turnips weren’t even fresh.

Creatives know that, at best, they are Salieri. Even the creatives who are Mozart believe it.

I am creative. I haven’t worked in advertising for 30 years, but in my nightmares it’s my former creative directors who judge me. And they are right to do so. I’m too lazy, too easy and when it really matters, my mind goes blank. There is no pill for creative dysfunction.

I am creative. Every deadline I meet is an adventure that makes Indiana Jones look like a retiree snoring in a lounge chair. The longer I stay creative, the faster I am when I do my work, and the longer I brood and walk in circles and stare blankly before doing that work.

I’m still 10 times faster than people who are not creative, or people who have only been creative for a short time, or people who have only been professionally creative for a short time. It’s just that before I work 10 times faster than them, I spend twice as much time as them procrastinating. I am so confident in my ability to do great work when I put my mind to it. That’s how addicted I am to the adrenaline of procrastination. I’m still very afraid of jumping.

I’m not an artist.

I am creative. Not an artist. Although as a child I dreamed of being one one day. Some of us belittle our gifts and dislike ourselves because we are not Michelangelo or Warhol. That’s narcissism, but at least we’re not in politics.

I am creative. Although I believe in reason and science, I decide by intuition and impulse. And live with what follows: both the catastrophes and the triumphs.

I am creative. Every word I’ve said here will upset other creatives, who see things differently. Ask two creatives a question and get three opinions. Our disagreement, our passion for it, and our commitment to our own truth are, at least for me, proof that we are creative, no matter how we feel about it.

I am creative. I regret my lack of taste in areas of which I know very little, that is, in almost all areas of human knowledge. And I trust my taste above all else in the areas closest to my heart, or perhaps, more accurately, to my obsessions. Without my obsessions, I’d probably have to spend my time looking life in the eye, and almost none of us can do that for long. Honestly no. Not precisely. Because many things in life, if you really look at them, are unbearable.

I am creative. I believe, as a father believes, that when I’m gone, a small good part of me will remain in at least one other person’s mind.

Working saves me from worrying about work.

I am creative. I live in fear that my little gift will suddenly disappear.

I am creative. I’m too busy doing the next thing to spend too much time deeply considering that almost nothing I do will come close to the greatness I comically aspire to.

I am creative. I believe in the ultimate mystery of the process. I believe in it so much that I’m even foolish enough to publish an essay that I dictated on a small machine and didn’t take the time to proofread or proofread it. I won’t do this often, I promise. But I did it a moment ago, because, as much as I was afraid of you seeing my pitiful gestures towards the beautiful, I was even more afraid of forgetting what I came to say.

There. I think I said it.