Creative Type

Am I the creative type? What does that even mean? For what it’s worth I do consider myself creative. Not in the sense that I create art. In the sense of how my mind works. Where it takes me and I take it. The open mindedness of it. The emotion of it.

In college I took a creative writing class during the summer. It was a small group; eclectic in age and backgrounds. The teacher had her own writings which she read. An older man seemed genuinely interested in what I wrote. A young man who wrote astonishing well but faced harsh criticism from the teacher for being naive and wrong about society. For my part, I struggled with plot; less so on characters. I wrote historical fiction short stories generating ideas by walking through the campus library. The teacher dismissed me as a writer since I was a computer science major. Also, my writing wasn’t very good. A bit creative, but technically not so good.

Not so many years later I was married to a creative, a writer, who didn’t write much. Struggled with plot. But she was gifted and technically skilled as a writer. She saw the creative in me despite me working as a software engineer at a bank. She saw the real me and the person I aspire to be.

Later in life I dated an artist for a few years. She knew all the best of Beijing. It wasn’t about the popular places; it was about the interesting places. And the good things. An exhibition opening, a small restaurant with daily handwritten menus, buying flowers wholesale, backyard BBQs with ad hoc musical jams. She saw me fairly well, as open minded but she herself was often closed minded and judgmental. She got away with so much shit our friends would dismiss as “well..she is an artist!”.

In my job now I work with software engineers. World class ones. I used to be a really good engineer but not in the way that most of them are. I get concepts. I make connections. I can do details but not every detail. I can do the strategy but not large ones that matter. In, short, I’m multiple. I consider my work creative. Always did. On my first job, at that bank, a trainer said software engineering is not creative at all. He said this as he left the company in order to write novels. I thought he was so wrong. I still do. Software is about creating something from nothing. Yes, there is a mechanical part of it which can be tedious. That is the craft. Writers have craft. Painters have a craft. The have their creative expression, as do I.

Now that creative expression when you work for bosses is complicated. I used to find the creatively in the nuance of my work. In the code. Arranging it one way or another. Over time I’ve loss control. I don’t have room to be creative. The suggestions is to find something outside of work to express it. That is difficult for me given all the energy I put into work. So, my creative spirit, for now, is suppressed. But I’m still a creative. I will stop working for bosses at some point. I will have the freedom the create. I hope I can find likeminded people who see me; the real me and not pigeonhole me as the engineer. The foreigner. The older guy. And I will try to see them as they are.  

What triggered this post? Last week we had our annual work offsite. It is my least favorite week of the year. Absolutely hate it. Stresses me out. The offsite structure is similar every year. One day travel to a location in China, one day meetings followed by large gala dinner, one day sightseeing, and one day travel back home. Because of COVID last year’s offsite was virtual and this year was mostly virtual. We just did one night with dinner followed by the next day sightseeing. The stress gets my mind turned around. Makes me reflect. I could say the offsite this year was stressful because there are very few foreigners (2 out of 400 for my group) and almost all the communication is in Chinese. In previous years there were more foreigners and several years ago there was an effort to make she we understood what was going and were taken care of. All gone now. But I didn’t feel better about the offsites in those years. Still stressful. I think I will skip next years offsite which is frowned upon. But hey.