{"id":1710,"date":"2025-03-11T11:22:05","date_gmt":"2025-03-11T15:22:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?p=1710"},"modified":"2025-03-11T11:22:06","modified_gmt":"2025-03-11T15:22:06","slug":"creativity-vs-competence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/?p=1710","title":{"rendered":"Creativity vs Competence"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Something crystalized for me this morning, and I don\u2019t know yet how I feel about it, nor where it might take me. Those are good things. The catalyst was reading vrk\u2019s \u2018How to draw a cover: An essay against AI art,\u2019 and then reading her profile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oversharing time. Close this now. Seriously, this post contains references to suicidal thinking patterns that may be disturbing for some readers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

-=-<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I never had a midlife crisis in my 40s. I was just trying to survive a bunch of really bad financial decisions and was just starting my real career after a long series of jobs that started with randomly joining the Navy at 18 because I enjoyed taking\/did well on the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) test one day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, that\u2019s an example of my typical decision-making process for most of my life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also, apparently it is possible to be too busy surviving to have a midlife crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, I\u2019m having my midlife crisis now, or something very like it, although midlife is doing a lot of work there, unless I somehow live to be 130 years old, which\u2026 unlikely for a bunch of reasons, including that I don\u2019t do anything to stay healthy, but. Yeah. Different topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A bunch of (much needed) therapy starting about 6 years ago helped me figure out that a lot of my life was a reaction to the years of bullying I lived through, roughly from age 8 to 18, and from dealing with an untreated personality disorder, likely partly due to said bullying combined with some pretty bad family tragedies and the very typically bad parenting experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, the therapy helped me get my head screwed on straight for the first time in my life, but it is clear that I\u2019ve been missing one important thing; any real reason to live other than sheer momentum. \u2018No reason to live\u2019 isn\u2019t an exaggeration. I haven\u2019t seen much point of anything for a long while now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I suspect that I\u2019ve spent the last few years looking for a bit more meaning, and not finding it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

vrk\u2019s profile brought something into focus for me; a huge portion of my life, inside and outside of work, has been an attempt to exhibit competence. Not just to be competent at something, but to show it. To get people to affirm my competence. At almost anything, really. Performative competence as a way to pay for permission to exist. Because I have mistaken competence for two other things;<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, I\u2019ve mistaken competence for personal worth. All my life I have believed very deeply that I am not really worthy. Worthy of living. Of having a place to live, of having friends, unless I can prove my value somehow. I have a very obvious pattern (obvious in retrospect, not obvious at the time) of taking up hobbies, getting just good enough to demonstrate some competence with the skills involved, then abandoning the craft and going on to something else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think now that I\u2019ve had something close to an addict\u2019s need for hits of validation; proving my worth by proving my ability to learn things quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Secondly, I have put competence in a role that should have been filled by creativity. I\u2019ve frequently said over the years that I\u2019m not creative, but that\u2019s not true. I do have a creative streak, and it\u2019s been visible to me in the creative problem solving I\u2019ve done at work recently, coming up with ways of using software to help people get their work done. It has been intensely satisfying, and I suspect that a lot of my struggle to find something to be good at has been a misplaced desire to be creative. Or rather, a misplaced attempt at executing creativity. For example, I\u2019ve mistaken artistic competence I see in others as evidence of their creativity. But the creativity is in the choices they make, the problems they\u2019ve solved, the ideas they\u2019ve discovered, not in how well they\u2019ve executed the work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve recently been practicing sketching, and have been playing with ideas of various artists I\u2019ve found on Substack and on YouTube. My interest has been caught by artists like Andrew James (coffee in drawings out), whose drawings are not \u2018true to life,\u2019 but are somehow truer to life than any attempt at photorealism. Andrew\u2019s creativity is the key.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think that what I\u2019ve been missing, perhaps for my entire life, is permission to be creative, rather than skillful. I know I can learn the skills. Can I let myself be creative? Can I finally do something for myself, not to impress someone, not to prove my worth?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My constant chasing the fix has been exhausting (and expensive).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s going to be hard to give myself the room to learn who I am, or who I might be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

-=-<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1 vrk: substack.com\/@vrkmakes<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

2 How to draw a cover: substack.com\/home\/post\/\u2026<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

3 Andrew James https:\/\/substack.com\/@ajamesdraws<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

4 The photo below is from yesterday\u2019s journal entry. I had a sudden urge to draw a mechanical gear, and the five numbered drawings are the steps as I worked out how to do it. I\u2019m not sure why I\u2019m sharing it. Maybe more of that fix-seeking behavior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Something crystalized for me this morning, and I don\u2019t know yet how I feel about it, nor where it might take me. Those are good things. The catalyst was reading vrk\u2019s \u2018How to draw a cover: An essay against AI art,\u2019 and then reading her profile. Oversharing time. Close this now. Seriously, this post contains … Continue reading “Creativity vs Competence”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":false,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-post"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pgY3e-rA","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1710"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1712,"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1710\/revisions\/1712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madstone.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}