I am a CREATOR

I don’t want to be like anyone else. Throughout my career, these words reverberated around in my head.  They were quiet at first, nothing more than a whisper, but that whisper turned into a shout by my mid to late thirties.  When the shouting began, I began to speak the words to others, sometimes in a whine and other times a roar.  The reaction I got when spewing these words differed depending who I was speaking to.  At times the reaction felt fatherly, not in a supportive way but in a,That’s nice dear. Now go off and play, kind of way.  The other reaction I received which felt better but was still not satisfying was some form of: You could never be like everyone else.  Because you see, I did not want to be different in small and subtle ways.  I wanted to STAND OUT in a way that hits people over the head, makes them pay attention, and fills them up with inspiration and awe. I have worked with many companies over the years.  Some understood my drive, saw the opportunity in it, and let me run free.  While others were bothered by it, annoyed really as if I were a fly that kept dive bombing their eyeballs.  And yet, even in the worst of circumstances, there was still nothing more exciting to me than sharing the news, I have a crazy idea.

I have a sinking feeling as to where this drive to not to be like anyone else comes from.  I believe it was a voice created by my psyche to counter the message I was fed at first by my mother at age 7.  

You are never to be a dancer.  If you become a dancer, you won’t have enough money for food, you won’t have enough money for rent, you won’t even have enough money for a decent pair of ballet slippers.  

This is the message that came from mom, who by the way was a dancer and owned  a very successful dancing school in Bayridge Brooklyn. The message was confusing to me not only as a child but as I grew up, becasue at the time I was the star of the dancing school, or at least that was how I felt.  Our home was a four bedroom apartment which sat above the dancing school, and so as soon as I finished my homework, down the stairs I ran.  I was in an advanced tap class at nine years old and not just because I was the owner’s daughter.  I deserved to be there.  My mother also started taking me to professional dance classes in Manhattan with her teacher Charles Kelly.  I was the only child allowed in class, and I can still remember their first time I walked into that studio. I was filled with a mix of excitement, fear and awe.  I had never seen a man wear high heels or a cropped belly top before, and I had never been in a room of dancers that I recognized from TV.  

My mother stopped me before we walked into the studio, crouched down and looked me right in the eye.  Now don’t embarrass me, she said.  But there was no way I was going to embarrass her or myself. I was here to show these people what I could do. I was here to prove that I was one of them.  At seven, I was able to pick up and follow all of the choreography, and I can still feel what it was like to leap across the studio floor.  It was one of the most joyous, alive, and most confident times of my life, and so you can see why being told that I was never to become a dancer really did not make sense to me.  I could not metabolize the idea and so it stayed with me as I got older and morphed and changed into..

You are never to become anything that brings you fully alive, especially if it's something creative.

I still believe my mother’s heart was in the right place.  Most of the dancers she knew she saw as struggling, including the ones that worked for her. I am pretty sure though that they had money for food, rent, and decent pair ballet slippers, but I digress.  With this morphed message living in my head I could never give myself permission to do the really creative thing, so instead of becoming an artist, I studied art history.  And then, just before my graduation, my father chimed in.

You should really go to work for a bank.  There are hardly any women in banking.  You could really excel.

Again this message came from a place of love, but the only career that I could imagine dreading more than working for a bank, was selling copiers and fax machines door to door.  So my career began within a creative field in support of other creatives.  First as a Sales Assistant Manager, then and Executive Assistant, then a Sales Executive, next I was an Outside Sales Person, and then finally I was given the opportunity to step into the more creative work of Trend Shopping, Merchandising & Product Development.  Ironically it was my father that gave me this opportunity, and whether he meant to or not, this work started to give me the confidence to listen to the whisper that up until then I had been ignoring.  

The journey of becoming a creative, which I realize now was really a rediscovery of who I am and what I stand for, was still a difficult one.  I encountered bosses that would hit me over the head with a metaphoric cast iron pan everytime I came up with a creative idea. I heard the word no more times than I care to remember, and I was shamed into feeling that I was not enough, I was in fact stupid, and my ideas would never work.  But there was something inside of me that kept me moving forward, maybe it was stubbornness, maybe it was the desire to prove them all wrong, and maybe I was driven but the same voice I heard when I first walked into Charles Kelly’s studio, I am here to show the world what I can do.  I am here to show creatives that I am one of them. 

I suppose now, I am grateful to my parents and all of the people who told me no throughout my career, because it was their voices speaking in unison that made me search in the deepest parts of myself for what was really important to me.  They drove me to put my crazy ideas into action, and every time I did something magical happened.  I’d make a new connection, feel the support of a community, and I’d see the effects of my work on people’s faces as well as their phones.  It was this journey that allowed me to prove to myself what I was capable of, it helped me to believe in my own creativity, and gave me the confidence to say I am a CREATOR.