I’m a Creative, Dammit

The Stories We Inherit—and How We Finally Outgrow Them

For fifty years, I told myself I was not creative.

My dad was an artist. He made charcoal and pencil drawings. Painted animal murals on the walls of my baby room. Wrote poems. Designed a Japanese garden in a suburban backyard.

His profession? A printer. There was color and quality control, but little room for imagination. He was undoubtedly creative. But it seemed his creativity dwindled through adulthood.

My younger brother got the creative gene. He studied and practices landscape architecture.

Me? I’m the classic Gen-X oldest girl from a divorced family. As expected, I’m responsible, an achiever, a mediator. I studied math and enjoyed a multi-decade career as an investment professional. 

Achievement was identity.

Fast forward a few decades and I find myself making a big move from San Francisco to Santa Fe.

“It speaks to me” say most people who visit Santa Fe and decide it’s their vibe. I heard few words when we first visited. It was late spring 2020 and the height of COVID. If people were speaking, it was behind a mask.

My husband and I decided to take the leap. We put in an offer on a house. I would live there full-time. If we didn’t like it, we’d change course. It didn’t feel like a time to be overly analytical.

I spent a lot of time that summer culling items from our home in San Francisco. Seventeen years in one place leads to accumulation. We were both guilty. But little black dresses from the 1990s don’t take up as much space as multiple sets of 1980s stereo equipment.

I remember unpacking in our new home we nicknamed The Zen House. It begged to show off its fine wood, diamond plastered walls and the natural stone and trees framed by our windows. Once here, there was yet more culling, followed by curation.

With everything from five decades of life laid out, I looked at things differently. I wanted to merge my past and my present. My life and Bob’s. I wanted to tell stories. Connect color and patterns.

Looking back, I realized this is when I began to think like an artist.

• I found articles I wrote for our community newspaper at age 16. I giggled at my teenage wit. I forgot I was a writer. 
• There were three volumes of published student poems from my high school. I’m proud to say I was the most published author. I forgot I was a poet.
• I thumbed the original script I wrote, performed and won an award for in a scholarship pageant. A judge had compared me to Erma Bombeck (are you kidding me??) I forgot I was a scriptwriter and performer.

Did I forget? Or did I simply stop believing those parts of me counted? When did this happen? 

I started seeing our many bookshelves not as storage but as a canvas. I rolled one of my rediscovered high school poems into Bob’s grandfather’s antique typewriter and displayed it. I arranged ancestral photos in a mini-tale of family history. I collected books in arrays only I understood.

I saw all of The Zen House as a canvas. I wasn’t decorating a house, but writing an autobiography with objects. I wanted the feel to be a place where anyone could wander and relax. Where someone would sit down in our living room, exhale, and say “this space just feels like…you.”

One day it happened. I smiled. “Thank you.”

Living in Santa Fe means living among people who create. You wander into a new gallery on Canyon Road and discover an artist friend has launched a new venture with his partner. Someone pulls you through an adobe doorway into a hidden garden and wine bar. Over dinner at a friend’s new restaurant, you find yourself helping name a cocktail. You befriend artists—and they befriend you.

I invite global artists into our home via their works. 

There’s the tapestry from Jaipur, India, purchased only after a fish dinner became part of the negotiation. There’s a portrait of my friend’s Rwandan family. A painting embedded with sand from an Israeli artist’s favorite beach. And a mixed-media work made from book covers called The Storm, inspired by my childhood Lake Michigan.

Then I started creating. 

Santa Fe didn’t make me creative. It gave me permission.

When an artist offered to teach me mixed-media art in her studio in Palm Springs, I asked “What day?” and got in the car. I spent a summer afternoon creating in the garden of a famed 19th-century artist’s home on Canyon Road. When Creative Santa Fe opened a call to create and present a PechaKucha presentation, I applied.

I was accepted. I worked for hours shaping twenty images and a six-minute, forty-second narrative into one of my most poignant life stories.

When I stood on the stage and took a bow at the end of the night with seven other legit creators, I said to myself, “I’m a creative, dammit.”

So maybe this place called Santa Fe does speak to us.

Not because it shows us who we should be. It reminds us who we’ve always been.

I used to think creativity belonged to artists—like my dad, my brother.

I’ve discarded the story. 

The way I arrange a bookshelf, tell a story, host a gathering, or shape a life is creative work. So is the way someone cooks a meal, designs a garden, or builds a business.

Five years later, I see myself like my home—a beautiful piece of mixed media.

Creativity doesn’t have to dwindle through adulthood. It can return in a form that is entirely our own.

Maybe our mid-life identity isn’t waiting somewhere ahead of us.

It’s right here, quietly waiting to be rediscovered.

Santa Fe has helped me rediscover parts of myself I had overlooked. I’m working on curating new Ventures here that invite others to experience the place beyond its galleries and restaurants. More on that soon…