Let me put on my creativity socks

When I was little it took me forever to put on my socks. For the life of me I couldn't get them to go on correctly. There would always be these lumps in the material. They'd get bunched up in the arch of my foot or the seam that runs across the toes would be crooked and produce a knot of fabric I could feel with my pinky toe.

When I was little I was a chronic sock smoother. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in its humble beginnings. My mom could recite volumes about this ritual I went through every morning. She even wrote a poem about it in the vein of Shel Silverstein.

This procedure continued for years. I'd put on my socks two, three, twenty times before I actually got it right. Even then I'd put my foot in my shoe only to find that I'd missed a lump that was directly under my middle toe and have to start all over again. From the beginning. I'm sure this made me late on more than one occasion.

Then one day, for no apparent reason, it stopped. Something in me just didn't care anymore. I grew out of it. I'd go to school with three, four, five lumps in my socks and be totally fine. This is right around the time I started being creative. Right around the time I started drawing. When I found my outlet.

Two days ago I had what you'd call a relapse. I was a good twenty minutes late for work because the lumps simply wouldn't go away. My socks wouldn't go on straight and every time I put my foot in my shoe there would be the little bunches of material of my youth, mocking me, keeping me from going about my life. There might as well have been mountains in my shoes.

I guess what this is really about is being creative. Lately, I don’t know, I feel like I’ve lost touch with that side of myself. Sure, I still occasionally do little things that keep the spark, but I haven’t done anything on a really grand scale in over a year. This needs to be remedied.

I had a conversation with a friend and came to the conclusion that being creative is a lot like working out. It’s a lot easier if you have someone there to spot you. This is my plan over the course of the next year. To form a creative group that we can all bounce ideas off. A system of checks and balances. A system of inspiration.

I understand that one cannot always be creative. There has to be breaks. Imagine a chocolate chip cookie without the crumbly cookie matrix. A cookie only comprised of chips. It wouldn’t be a cookie at all, just a wad of chocolate. Without balance things get old very quickly.

On the other side of that argument though, I feel like I haven’t bitten into a chip in so long I’ve forgotten what one tastes like.