The Creative Process is Like A Maze

I’m wrapping up another semester with my Visual Development students this week.  I’ve been teaching a handful of classes at The Academy of Art in San Francisco for the past couple of years, and I usually end each semester with a few words of encouragement (and perhaps some bittersweet tears as well… I’m a softie!).  I usually end up telling my students how privileged I am for having the chance to share my knowledge with them, but also that I end up learning as much from them as they do from me. It’s the truth!  Teaching reinvigorates my own interest in design and storytelling, but it’s just as helpful to me to watch the learning and creative process unfold in my students. 

My biggest role as a teacher is to motivate my students on, as I see them follow familiar patterns of resistance and frustration, alternating with bursts of momentum and flow.  The creative process is like a maze, one which I find myself in often. I know how stressful and discouraging feeling lost in that maze can be.  Teaching allows me to view that journey from an outside perspective.  I can see how far each student has come and how close they are to reaching their goals.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned through my experience is that the maze will always be solved as long as you keep going.  It isn’t always easy, you might make some wrong turns, and sometimes the right path isn’t always the one you really want to take, but you’ll eventually be triumphant as long as you don’t sit down and give up in the middle of it.  

The problem with being inside the maze is that you never really know if the exit is right around the corner, so it can help to have someone on the outside cheering you on, reassuring you that the struggle will be worth it.  While we’re in school, the best teachers will act as cheerleaders and guides.  After graduation, a cheerleader can come in the form of a mentor or someone whose opinion you value.  Other times, you may need to act as your own. 

This is how my students teach me in return.  I get to watch in admiration as I see them make their way to the end of their own mazes, time and time again, and their journeys help me muster that self-confidence my own mazes can be conquered.

I’m not really sure what the future holds in the age of Coronavirus, but I figure it’s as good a time as any to start a creative journal.  Along with my Limerence project, I plan on focusing on creativity here- whatever forms it takes on in my life at the moment- and sharing some of my thoughts from inside the maze.