I’m an obsessive note-taker. Okay… maybe I should use kinder words to describe myself, but my computer is FILLED with documents of notes and excerpts I’ve spent hours copying out and reflecting on from the books I’ve read/ am reading.

At one point in my life,I thought that this ‘habit’ was a gross waste of my time (namely 3 1/2 years ago while sitting in the Waves cafe on Richards and Hastings taking notes on ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ in between my draining and soul-withering shifts working for minimum wage as a hostess at a family restaurant). It felt like self-indulgent ‘busy’ work.

But then, I was introduced to people like Gretchen Rubin (The Happiness Project) and Maria Popova (BrainPickings.com) and I realized that there was a lot of value in this habit – this desire to record my learnings and the thoughts expressed by others that perfectly capture something I immediately saw mirrored inside of myself.

If creativity is combining ideas and making sense of them, then that’s what I’ve tried to do in the following essay (and I know that is a more intimidating word than say ‘article’, but an essay is what I set out to write because I think the word ‘article’ feels like a less curious exploration, and a less genuine mode of sharing. But that’s just my perception).

Before writing this essay, I went through several documents of my notes and pulled the quotes that jumped out at me as being relevant to ‘creativity’ – the topic I was suddenly inspired to explore.

I also wanted to explore what exactly I was/am trying to accomplish with Creative Life. With my life. I then tried my best to make sense of these quotes and thoughts as a whole. To be honest, it sort of wrote itself.

This essay includes quotes by Brene Brown (researcher storyteller – I’m reading her book ‘Rising Strong’ now), Sylvia Plath (novelist and poet), Marsha Norman (playwright), Julia Cameron (writer and teacher, The Artist’s Way), Virginia Woolf (novelist and poet), Eckhart Tolle (philosopher), Jeanette Winterson (novelist), John Hirsch (director), Steven Kotler (journalist), and John Patrick Shanley (playwright).

Links to the books I used can be found at the bottom of the essay.

Read it here.