Cultivating Creativity Is an Inside Job, Bernadette

Yesterday, I watched the movie Where'd You Go Bernadette (2019) based on the best selling novel of the same name by Maria Semple.

I wish I had read the book before seeing the movie — I’m willing to bet it is a good read — I agree with its premise: female genius stifles her creativity and nearly ends up in the loony bin. She stuffs down the best part of herself for a good 20 years and turns to a new drug: negativity.

Bernadette turns neurotic, overbearing, mean, delusional, anxious, aggressive, an antisocial nuance to her family — she has no friends except for an imaginary assistant she dictates to via email — she blames everyone else for her problems, yet, she is EXTREMELY lovable.

I’m familiar with the type. She has a special relationship with her daughter that unfolds sweetly on the screen.

*spoiler alert*

By the end of the film, Bernadette stops denying her true essence, her creative side — what gives her goosebumps and makes her feel alive — and finally stops wasting years of her life on regret and anger over the past.

I believe this premise. I have seen it play out in real life. I have witnessed those, OK, usually women, deny themselves something of their own that moves their soul while they are doing it, all in the name of being an exceptional wife and/or mother, and taking care of their families only to lose themselves, or to lose something they once loved doing, all for the greater good.

We are all born creatives

If we are fortunate, we are born to parents who nurture and support us in any creative pursuit we are attracted to trying.

I’ve been lucky to have taken ballet, jazz, drawing, painting, photography, woodworking, piano, pottery, lessons in French, German and Spanish all before the age of ten.

As a reaction to me not talking much before the age of five — turns out I’m just not a big talker — my conventional parents took the very brave step and pulled me out of my traditional school and enrolled me in a very hippy, art school where a majority of the teachers wore Birkenstocks, before fifth grade we knew how to milk a cow and the students were required to draw most of their lesson books to use in class.

These creative opportunities given to me didn’t make me a creative person; it encouraged my creativity to blossom.

Believe me, when I say, we are all born creative beings.

What is creativity?

American neurologist Alice Flaherty, in her book The Midnight Disease, talks about the neural basis of creativity:

“A creative idea will be defined simply as one that is both novel and useful (or influential) in a particular social setting.”

Creativity comes in many different forms and makes our humanity shine.

Calling on your creativity can be helpful in any occupation. You can be creative as an accountant, a programmer, an entrepreneur, a web developer, an orthodontist can be creative in the way she runs her business. There are many jobs, tasks, and avenues one can apply their natural-born creativity.

I’m grateful my parents could send me to a nontraditional school where creativity was essential to one’s growth as a human being.

When education places a high value on learning through art and creativity, it promotes in the learner the ability for critical and outside-the-box thinking

Create or perish

The stifling of one’s creativity can lead to sickness: in mind — as in Bernadette’s case — or in the body.

Brené Brown has said about creativity,

“Unused creativity is not benign. It metastasizes. It turns into grief, rage, judgment, sorrow, shame.”

Which is precisely the journey Bernadette faces after not practicing a craft in which she excels.

Brené Brown again:

“I used to believe before I did the research for The Gifts of Imperfection… that there were creative people and there were non-creative people. And now I absolutely understand personally (and professionally from the data) that there is no such thing as non-creative people. There are just people who use their creativity and people who don’t. And unused creativity is not benign.”

Expressing our unique and individual selves through creative expression is vital for all of us.

It is a trait that allows us to show our humanity and is what makes us successful as a species and as individuals. Think Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs and J.K. Rowling. Each made indelible contributions to society as a whole through their creative pursuits and thinking.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love says, writes,

“A creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life.”

Pick up a paintbrush, draw, trim a bonsai, take a dance class, find joy in creating, even if you aren’t Picasso or Monet. Write a book; even if it isn’t great, it will be creative.

Lately, I have been struggling with my writing and not feeling ‘good enough,’ which is my way of stuffing my creativity and preventing me from sitting down to write.

When I don’t write, I feel my creativity shrinking. On the flip side, when I write regularly — whether I think it is good or not — my creativity expands, ideas flow, connections form, I begin grabbling with new concepts and seeing how they intersect, which grows my creative mind.

Even at the thought of writing, after a few days away from my computer, my mind opens, and I find myself searching for connections between many ideas that don’t seem to fit at first until I start writing them down and parsing them out. I’m immediately content when I’m tapping into the side of me that demands thought and attention and focus.

It is a release, a challenge.

And just as in the film, when this dawns on Bernadette, and she stops denying herself her true self, she connects with the side of her that brings her joy, gives her goosebumps, lifts her spirit and makes her dance her happy dance.

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Jessica is a writer, an online entrepreneur, and a recovering type-A personality. She lives in Los Angeles with her extrovert daughter, two dogs, and two cats.