The Bible tells us that mankind was made in the image of their Creator. What does that mean? I believe that we were designed to be creators too. Creators of our own life.
I am pretty sure that our modern standard life of going to school, working 9-5, marriage, kids, a house and a dog is not how we were meant to live. It is a standardized box we all try to fit in to be “normal”. But we are all unique. I believe that we were meant to create lives that are absolutely unique.
Especially when you struggle with trauma, dissociation or even DID. The box is too small for you, it’s the wrong shape, you might have to let go of the idea of meeting the standard people came up with and go back to what people were meant to do: get creative with your life.
I often have to think of the TV show Chopped. It’s a cooking show, where the contestants get a basket full of “mystery” ingredients, random or weird stuff that usually doesn’t go well together. They get very limited time to come up with a meal that contains all the ingredients in some way.
Life gave us a whole basket full of weird mystery ingredients. Stuff nobody else would use for cooking. We can stand there and stare, despairing over the fact that this will never make proper mac & cheese. But that just means that we are losing life-time and the ingredients won’t change.
At the foundation of a creative life is radical acceptance. That’s an inner position that acknowledges that there is nothing you can do to change the past and that your basket contains mystery ingredients. It means to embrace what is instead of rejecting or ignoring it. It also means taking a deep look into your basket and make it your basket.
Only then you can start the process of creating a life that fits you. It is a huge experiment. Don’t expect to get everything working at your first attempt. Nobody has done this with just your unique ingredients before. No shame. You don’t fail, you just discover something new.
Find your sense of curiosity and use it to become a researcher and explorer. Start with smaller areas of your life to get the hang of it. Find out who you are, including your basket, and create something that matches you. Try to forget how other people do this. You are unique, you are a creator, an artist of life.
If you keep this attitude through all the difficulties of life, the understanding that at any given time you are here to create something new, you might just be unstoppable.
It’s ok to cry over not having the mac&cheese. That’s human. We have cried many hot tears over our life and how we didn’t sign up for this. The important part is to return to your mission of creating. Live life as an artist. You have all it takes. Don’t give up.
Maybe, just maybe, the universe needs you. Needs you to help creating itself. Maybe it is your place in this world to come up with new solutions nobody else could think of.
Beautifully put.
I like the analogy you share about the show ‘Chopped’’.
For a time we needed to seek help from a local food-share program (kind of like a food bank, but much more informal). Anyways the food we were given was usually super strange and not what we would normally prefer, or even sometimes even really knew what to do with at all, but it was what we were given and what we needed to get by, so we made it a game we called, “Iron Chef Foodbank”. We made a game of having to enter “kitchen stadium” to make something amazing from something impossible and even absurd. We had to learn knew things and do some research to figure out what exactly we were dealing with at all!! Sometimes there were rotten bits that we had to carefully work around and remove first before we could make something nourishing from what we were given.
Nowadays we like art therapy, and our favorite is to find weird objects, castaways given to us or even trash I dig up out of the mud in the woods or find on the roadside, or just impossibly nonfunctional stuff we find at thrift shops. We tear it all apart, harvest useful bits, store those carefully because they might still have potential, and then remake it all into something interesting and FUNCTIONAL. Its funky, but I am now known for making cool stuff from practically nothing and I sometimes make money and others think of me when they have unusual things that need new homes with an inventive person.
The whole process of figuring out to even do this kind of art reminds us that any given template of beingness can change when the creator shifts and revisions it anew. Making repurposing art is also a nice safe creative space for parts to meet up and work together on repatterning and building internal relationships.
Art happens. And there is no eARTh without art. I didn’t realize it was going to be quite such a rebuild situation here on planet but, even “kitchen stadium” has its moments of levity too.