Today, I want to talk about one of the most insidious myths surrounding creativity: the notion that “You’re either born creative, or you’re not.”

I’ve heard this many times from many different sources, including teachers, college professors, coworkers, and fellow writers. In fact, I’ve heard it so much that it has begun to feel like it should be true, like it’s some kind of helpful piece of folk wisdom. 

But it’s not. It’s a dangerous lie.

“I’m not creative,” people tell me, almost apologetically, whenever I speak on the topic. They don’t feel like they were “born” creative (whatever that even means) — because at some point, someone told this to them, and they believed it. 

“Oh, I’m not creative,” a coworker insisted to me, years ago, “but I’m good at math and numbers.”

This echoes another popular version of the same myth: that you’re either a “right-brained” person or a “left-brained” person. That you, for some reason, have to choose only one camp to belong to. As if each human being could be only one thing, when we all know that we are so much more.

Fun fact: you use both sides of your brain. Because you are a whole person with a whole brain. And even though it might feel like it sometimes, you’re not carrying around a bunch of cranial dead weight. Your brain is functional and whole and wonderful. 

Your brain is a creative instrument. It creates things all the time — ideas, dreams, memories, fantasies, hopes, wishes, and solutions.

It might not make the things you want it to make, in the way that you want it to make them. You know, the culturally approved “correct” way. 

You may get frustrated because when you draw something, it doesn’t look “correct,” or like something you’d see in a museum. You may get frustrated because when you write something, it doesn’t sound “correct”, or like anything a previously published author has written before.

And we’ll talk about those culturally approved “correct” ways to create in another post. But for now, I simply want you to know that you can create. You have permission to create. You were born with that permission, and it is your right as a human being to use your creativity to bring joy and fulfillment into your life.

We are all creative. Because that is the very essence of what it means to be human.