Cheerleading Creativity

 I keep repeating that my cure for despondency was coming back to the idea of creativity.

Therefore, I find Angela Yuriko Smith's Creativity Is How We Survive a great explication of my own ideas.

When systems strain and stories harden, we’re told, quietly and repeatedly, that there are fewer options now. Fewer paths. Less room to experiment. Less permission to change our minds. Creativity is reframed as indulgent, impractical, or dangerous at exactly the moment it becomes most necessary.

This is why we can’t think of creativity as a luxury. It’s a necessity. It is a survival skill.

Creativity is how humans adapt when the old maps stop working. It’s how we test alternatives, imagine exits, and keep meaning intact when familiar structures fail. Without it, we don’t just lose art. We lose flexibility. We lose ourselves.

Reclaiming our reality begins by rewriting over some of the most corrosive rhetoric we’re fed as creators… especially the idea that this work isn’t “real,” that it can’t sustain us, that it should be done only on the margins of a life that matters.

The truth is simpler and more dangerous: when we are creating, we are living. The return on that investment isn’t abstract. It’s survival.

We are all creators, and creativity is fueled by curiosity

***

When we reclaim our own reality, we help keep reality itself flexible. We keep imagination alive as a shared resource, not a private indulgence. Creativity is not something we do after we survive. It is how we survive.

Once we see that clearly, it becomes impossible to pretend this is a solo endeavor. Survival never is. Creativity doesn’t just help us navigate what’s ahead. It creates pathways others can follow.

sch 2/3